Cellular Reprogramming: Fountain of Youth or Snake Oil Scam?

It was a bad day recently for a Harvard genetics professor. The Daily Mail ran a story with the headline "Top Harvard professor Dr David Sinclair accused of 'selling snake oil' after pushing 'unscientific' pill said to reverse aging in dogs - and resigns from prestigious academy over backlash."  We read this:

"Dr David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been hit with allegations of pushing bogus antiaging drugs over the last decade - including one he was paid $720 million to develop by pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. The 54 year-old renowned scientist has made previous claims that he 'reversed' his own age by a decade using unconventional lifestyle 'hacks,' and most recently promoted an 'unscientific' supplement developed by his company that claimed to reverse aging in dogs. But the pill is said to 'not be supported by data,' according to University of Washington aging professor Matt Kaeberlein."

We read this about a study involving dogs:

"The dogs were tracked for six months, with 51 completing the study. Animals in the full-dose group showed slight improvements in cognition as reported by their owners after three months, but the effect was not maintained through six months. However, there was no difference between groups in changes in activity level, gait speed or cognitive tests performed by the researchers.

Dr Sinclair revealed the results on X alongside a promotional image for Leap Year, claiming: 'First-of-its-kind supplement clinically proven to slow effects of aging in dogs. Available at LeapYears.com.'

He shared a hyperlink that took his 441,000 followers to a landing page where they could buy the supplement for $70 to $130 for a one-month supply."

Scientists objected, saying that there was no evidence that the supplement reversed aging. Dr. Matt Kaberlein was quoted as saying this:

"Dr Kaeberlein, a longevity biologist, wrote on X: 'I find it deeply distressing that we've gotten to a point where dishonesty in science is normalized to an extent that nobody is shocked when a tenured Harvard professor falsely proclaims in a press release that a product he is selling to pet owners has 'reversed aging in dogs.' To me, this is the textbook definition of a snake oil salesman."

Dan Eton, a data scientist at Mass General says, "David Sinclair consistently exaggerates the claims of research that he has a financial stake in. It makes me sick to my stomach."

The study is here. The study group sizes were not 51, but only about 16 per study group. We should not take very seriously any reported evidence of modest cognitive benefits, given the difficulty of measuring cognition in dogs, and the failure of this study to provide convincing experimental tests of dog cognition. 

Schematic depiction of next year's anti-aging supplement

The Harvard scientist criticized above (David Sinclair) is co-author (with Yang and others) of a 2023 paper "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging."  The paper makes the very dubious claim that "loss of epigenetic information accelerates the hallmarks of aging," that "these changes are reversible by epigenetic reprogramming," and that "by manipulating the epigenome, aging can be driven forward and backward."  These claims are sharply criticized by a critique of the paper, a paper entitled "Matters Arising: the information theory of aging has not been tested."  The authors are James A. Timmons and Charles Brenner. 

Referring to Yang and Sinclair's paper, Timmons and Brenner say "Extraordinary claims in the paper are unsupported by evidence," and that "no significant conclusion of Yang was demonstrated."  They say, "Despite statements in the summary, highlights and discussion and depiction in the graphical abstract, there was also no reversal of aging in the article and indeed, the corresponding author retracted such claims after publication (Supplementary Material 2)."  Referring to the journal Cell that the paper of Yang and Sinclair was published in, and recommending that the paper be retracted, Timmons and Brenner say this: 

"Cell publishes papers that provide 'significant conceptual advances'  on 'an interesting and important biological question.'  The journal is not supposed to publish misleading papers that fail to disclose citations and related manuscripts, obfuscate mechanisms, provide poorly controlled experiments, and grandiosely overstate results."

But the truth is that when publishing experimental neuroscience results, the journal Cell very often publishes poorly designed research following Questionable Research Practices, and such papers very frequently "grandiosely overstate results." The "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" paper is one with ridiculously small study group sizes such as 2 mice, 3 mice and 4 mice.  

I previously mocked the way-too-small study group sizes typically used in neuroscience cognitive research, noting that typically the total number of mice used is only about as big as the number of paper authors, saying that it was if these people were following  the ridiculous rule of only using one mouse per scientist. We have that type of situation in this "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" paper, which has 58 authors, but sounds like it used a total number of mice much fewer than that. The paper has no mention of a detailed blinding protocol, mentioning blinding only in passing when referring to two tiny fractions of the total work going on.  Why do big rich biotech companies work on papers with such ridiculously small numbers of mice and without decent blinding protocols? It sure isn't because they can't afford to test with 100 times more mice. The answer is probably: because it's so vastly easier to get false alarms when you use tiny study group sizes and don't use a decent blinding protocol. And the right type of false alarm can do wonders for the stock price of a biotech company. 

Sinclair has got very rich partially by writing a book entitled "Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To," a book selling millions of copies. A critical review of the book by a scientist (Charles Brenner) states this: 

"According to the book, Sinclair discovered genes called sirtuins that extend lifespan in organisms from yeasts to humans and he found sirtuin activators in red wine and elsewhere. Why do we age? Sinclair’s theory is poor information transmission that can be fixed by greater sirtuin function. Why we don’t have to age? He says that we can take sirtuin activators every morning and soon, we’ll take chemicals that will safely reprogram our genes to restore youthful vigor.....Do sirtuins extend lifespan in yeast, invertebrates and vertebrates? Has Sinclair discovered sirtuin activators? Based on 25 years of work by academic and industrial investigators, the clear answer to both questions is no (Brenner, 2022b).....In the accompanying Lifespan podcast, Sinclair makes innumerable non-evidence based statements about benefits of time-restricted eating, statements about age-reversal as evidenced only by changing biomarkers (Fahy et al., 2019), and even potential immortality by repeatable drug treatments. The latter statements were particularly shocking because one of the drugs used to lower biomarkers of aging was growth hormone, which is clearly defined by genetics as a pro-aging molecule (Bartke, 2021).....Sinclair’s attempts to commercialize scientific discoveries have an abysmal track record—these include the multibillion dollar investment of GSK in his sirtuin story (Schmidt, 2010) and Ovascience, whose work in female fertility could not be replicated (Powell, 2006; Weintraub, 2016). For scientific discoveries to be developed they need to be real but for books to sell, the stories just have to be good. The reach of Lifespan is a problem for the world precisely because a Harvard scientist is telling fictitious stories about aging that go nowhere other than continuing hype as legendary as anything in Herodotus."

Who's right and who's wrong here? I'll let the reader judge that. I do know from a long and very careful study of DNA that the idea that DNA or its genes are a "program" for either making or maintaining cells is a great big lie. DNA and its genes contain only low-level chemical information. DNA and its genes have no information on human anatomy, and do not even specify how to make or maintain any cell or any of the organelles that are the building components of a cell. So the idea that cells can be rejuvenated by medicine-induced "cellular reprogramming" seems pretty fishy. Scientists cannot even currently explain how a cell is able to reproduce. How there occurs the reproduction of something as enormously complex and organized as a human cell is a mystery very far over the heads of scientists. So what confidence can we have in scientists talking about "cellular reprogramming"? 

Biologists frequently underestimate the vast hierarchical complexity of human bodies, and very frequently speak as if they were trying to prevent the public from learning about such exquisite complexity, possibly because they may realize that the credibility of their claims of accidental biological origins is inversely proportional to the amount of fine-tuned organization and functional complexity of large organisms such as humans.  The more we properly understand the stratospheric levels of fine-tuned organization and hard-to-achieve complexity of human bodies, the less confidence we will have that scientists are anywhere near to being able to roll back aging by fiddling with so-called "cellular reprogramming."

An MIT Technology Review article in 2022 says this about claims that the lifespan of some mice have been extended by cellular reprogramming:

"So far, many of these individual rejuvenation claims for live mice haven’t been widely replicated by other labs, and some people are skeptical they ever will be. Measuring the relative health of animals or their tissues isn’t necessarily a precise science. And in unblinded studies (where the researchers know which animals were treated), wishful thinking can play a role, perhaps especially if billions in venture capital dollars ride on the result. 'Frankly, I doubt the reproducibility of these papers,” says Hiro Nakauchi, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. Nakauchi says he also created mice with Yamanaka factors, but he never saw any sign they got younger. He suspects that some of the most dramatic claims are 'timely and catchy' but that the science that went into them is 'not very accurate.'  "

From my careful study over many years of flaws in rodent studies wrongly claiming evidence of neural memory storage, I know some of the pathways of errors that can occur here:

(1) Scientists with very large funding are free to do innumerable studies, and may file away all negative results, not even submitting them for publication. Research practices for rodent students are currently poor, with a prevalence of Questionable Research Practices. 

(2) The number of mice used in such studies is typically very small, creating a significant chance (maybe 1 in 20) of "statistically significant" results in any one study, even if no real effect is involved. 

(3) With so many studies being done, it's easy to get something like a study showing some mice with higher lifespan. You can just get chance results, file away in your file cabinet the unsuccessful results, and submit for publication the luckiest results.  

Consequently, it means very little that some 3 billion dollar biotech company has a few studies showing a few mice lived longer than average when given some treatment. How many negative studies does it have filed away in its file cabinets, using the same methods?

There is still the possibility that there might be treatments that partially reverse aging. Part of aging is relatively uncomplicated stuff like the plaque that builds up in your arteries, like the gunk that slowly builds up in your kitchen drainpipe.  Reversing that may be  relatively simple. But something like that is totally different (and vastly simpler) than "cellular reprogramming."

Someone as old as me is old enough to remember that for 50 years scientists have been making claims that reversing or stopping aging was "right around the corner."  It seemed that for twenty years we were told that the key to stopping aging was just to shorten something called telomeres that are found on the ends of chromosomes. For decades we were told that there would soon be some medicine that would shorten telomeres to halt or stop aging. 

You don't hear too much about telomeres these days. 

Nowadays scientific papers have a very inadequate listing of the vested interests of the authors. After the end of the main text of the 2023 paper "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" in fine print we have a "Declaration of Interests" statement that refers to the massive vested interests of David A. Sinclair, noting "D.A.S. is a consultant, inventor, board member, and in some cases an investor in Life Biosciences (developing reprogramming medicines), InsideTracker, Zymo, EdenRoc Sciences/Cantata/Dovetail/Metrobiotech, Caudalie, Galilei, Immetas, Animal Biosciences, Tally Health, and more."  What is with the initials, which makes it hard for people to realize the conflict of interest involved? What should occur is that at the very beginning of a paper written by an author with vested interests, we should have a large-type  boldface plain English statement such as this:

"NOTE: One of the chief authors of this paper (John F. Schmitzenholzer)  has major stock investments in a company (XYZ Products, Inc.) that will financially benefit very much from the claims made in this paper, and that person receives large sums of money from that company. The same thing is true for most of the authors of this paper."

I can describe one big piece of statistical funny business that commonly occurs in scientific papers on so-called cellular reprogramming. It is what you can call the "remaining lifespan" trick. It works like this: you try some treatment on a small group of some very old mice, and even if the treatment has no benefit, there will be about 1 chance in 10  that you will be able to report that the treated mice had a significantly larger "remaining lifespan" than the untreated mice.  In captivity mice can have lifespans range from 6 to 18 months, or in some cases as long as 3 years. So if you start testing with very old mice, you can easily get variations in "remaining lifespan" of up to 200%, merely by chance. 

Consequently, we should not be impressed at all by the results in the paper here, which claims that some treatment on mice "extends the median remaining lifespan by 109% over wild-type controls."  The study started out with a treatment group of about 19 very old mice that were 124 weeks old, and a control group of about the same size and age (Figure 1C).  The mice lived on for between 3 weeks and 40 weeks, with the average remaining lifetime being about 15 weeks.  About 13 out of 19 of the treated mice had a remaining lifespan  greater than the average.  By using a binomial probability calculator such as the one at Stat Trek, you can see that this is a result that you might expect by chance (using a completely ineffective treatment) in about 8% of experiments like this:

 We should regard the reported result as being unimpressive when we consider that scientists are free to try experiments such as this mouse study many times, placing in their file drawers unsuccessful results, and submitting for publication results that reach about this level of success.  So given many biotech companies funding experiments of this type, we would expect to have multiple published results about as impressive as this one, even if the treatments have no effectiveness. 

We can get the real story here by considering not the tending-to-fool-you statistic of "increase in remaining lifespan" but the statistic of total lifespan.  The treated mice had a total lifespan of about 144 weeks, and the untreated mice had a total lifespan of about 136 weeks. The treated group of mice therefore had a total lifespan that was only about 6% greater than the untreated mice. But rather than reporting this statistic (which gives us the real story on how slight are the results), the paper has used the "remaining lifespan" trick to tell us the technically correct but very "give you the wrong idea" statistic that the "remaining lifespan" was 109% greater in the treated mice.  

But perhaps I am being too pessimistic about such cellular reprogramming.  I cannot claim to be a careful scholar of anti-aging research. I have spent many years very carefully studying the evidence that the human mind is not the product of the human brain, and evidence for psychical phenomena and paranormal phenomena that suggest humans are souls that will survive death (as you can see in my 198 posts here). Such evidence leaves me thinking that aging and death are nothing to fear. 

Was That Science Speaking, Or Mainly Just Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money?

A fundamental principle of realistic socioeconomics is: Big Money controls narratives.  We see a fictional example of how that works in the popular TV show Succession.  The show is about an old father (Logan Roy) who is a billionaire in control of a vast media empire. The father has four adult children, most of them eager to gain control of his media empire when the father dies. The character of Logan Roy may have been suggested by the example of the media baron Rupert Murdoch, who had a vast influence on the narratives of US elections. In episode 26 of Succession,  "What It Takes," the father and his adult children sit around and talk about whether they will pretty much decide who is going to be the next President of the United States, by throwing their media empire's support behind some longshot candidate. Logan Roy decides to back the candidate (Jeryd Mencken), who much later in the series is elected as the US President. 

The fictional series suggests that the Roy family's billions are in control of narratives that pretty much control the results of the US election. The show is fiction, but it sounds fairly realistic. Big Money controls narratives.  Such a principle holds true not merely in the world of politics, but in the world of science. 

We tend to think of the narratives we read in science articles and science books as being controlled by professors. But another way to look at the matter is to look at the money that fuels such professors and their books and articles and research. Earlier I published a pyramid diagram showing how science-related narratives are controlled by a tiny elite. The diagram is below:

It now dawns on me that this diagram is incomplete, because it fails to point out how much of an effect Big Money has on the narratives. Below is an enhanced version of the diagram mentioning the influence of such Big Money:

The huge pool of money controlling the narratives about human origins and the human mind and human brain and countless other topics consists of several huge concentrations of capital and cash flow:

(1) University endowments.  According to the wikipedia.org article here, the total endowments of US universities and colleges has been estimated at 807 billion dollars.  Harvard has an endowment of 49 billion dollars, and Yale has an endowment of 41 billion dollars, with several other Ivy League universities each having endowments of more than 20 billion dollars.  Science departments are only part of the business of universities, so we can't count all of this money as Darwin Dollars or Materialist Money. But we can count a significant fraction of this money as Darwin Dollars or Materialist Money. 

(2) Tuition payments.  Colleges and universities do not fund themselves purely by using up their endowments.  Such institutions are also funded by student tuition payments. A significant fraction of tuition payments effectively act as Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money.  Ironically, many who disagree with the teachings of Darwinism and materialism are forced to fund the propagation of such teachings, because they have to contribute high tuition payments that are used to fund such teachings. 

(3) Biotech and pharmaceutical corporate capital. To account for all of the Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money, we must also count the market capitalization of biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. This is an amount even greater than the total endowments of US universities and colleges. The page here states, "The Biotechnology industry has a total of 693 stocks, with a combined market cap of $1,346.99 billion and total revenue of $119.86 billion."  Why should we count a significant fraction of such money as part of the Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money? Because companies such as pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies have a huge financial stake in people believing in erroneous notions such as the idea that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories, so that they can sell pills and devices based on such ideas.

(4) Government contributions.  Darwinist claims and materialist claims are part of the curriculum taught in the biology classes and  psychology classes taught in public high schools in the United States, which are government funded. Public high schools in the US get hundreds of billions of dollars in government funding, mostly through local governments. A significant fraction of that money may be counted as Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money.  There is also the huge amount of money that state governments and the US federal government gives to universities and colleges, both in the form of direct grants and research grants. A significant fraction of this may be considered Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money.  A large fraction of universities these days have requirements that students must earn a certain fraction of their credits by taking science classes. Because it is well-known that college physics courses and college chemistry courses are some of the hardest courses to take, such a requirement effectively amounts to a requirement that every student take a biology course or a psychology course in which he is indoctrinated in the tenets of Darwinism and materialism. 

(5) Media corporations capital and contributions.  Nowadays information flows labeled as "science news" are part of a huge publication industry centered around clickbait. Very many web sites contain headlines with sensational-sounding headlines, often headlines boasting about some "epic breakthrough" or "stunning new insight" or "great leap forward." Clicking on the headline will take you to a page with ads, and whoever is running the website will profit from such ads.  Media companies contribute much money to run such sites, that tend to uncritically pass on the most dubious claims of Darwinism and materialism. Similarly, the publication of scientific papers (often involving shoddy irreproducible research dealing with brains and fossils) is a big for-profit industry. Very many corporate outflows and various types of media corporate capital may be considered as part of the Darwin Dollars and Materialist Money. 

The next time you hear the implausible claims of Darwinism and materialism being made (such as claims that you are just an accumulation of random mutations, and that your mind is just some by-product of chemical reactions in your brain) ask yourself: was that science facts speaking, or mainly just Big Money talking? In our society Big Money has almost unlimited power to control narratives.  

All those Harvard billions don't guarantee quality, because in today's news we have an article in which people are accusing a Harvard professor of being a "snake oil salesman" by claiming without good evidence that some supplement sold by some company he co-owns will reverse aging.  It seems that multiple Harvard professors have long been involved in hyping and overselling dubious products they have a financial stake in.  The diagram below illustrates some of the financial conflicts of interest that cast a great question mark on the objectivity of claims by neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Read here for an explanation of some of the squares. 

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 6)

Below are some posts I have published about people reporting they saw mysterious orbs with the naked eye:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 5)

Let us look at some more cases of this type. 

At the interesting thread here at www.citi-data.com, a user starts the thread with this comment

"My ex boyfriend passed away a little over four years ago. Four months after, I saw a gold/red colored orb in my bedroom. Without going into details, I just want to ask how many of you have received 'signs' after your loved one passed away?"

There are some very interesting answers in the nine pages of the thread.  For example, one user says, "My sister's broken grandfather clock started to chime when my grandmother passed away."

A user tells this interesting account:

"After my grandma died, she visited me in a dream, in her younger, healthier self, took me to this beautiful place that I remember describing as heaven (bright, pearly, just a lot of light and light feelings) and played games with me. She introduced me to her older brother who died when he was 7 (he still looked like a kid my age at the time) and we all played and she just made me feel...safe. She always had that ability. Anyways I woke up and my aunt who slept with me that night to comfort me told me that in my sleep I jumped up, raised my hands in the air and yelled, 'OH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE THIS IS!!!!!!!!!' And then laid back down. So I told her the dream. I told her about the little boy and my family looked shocked because they couldn't understand how I knew her older brother."

On another page of the thread a user says this:

"I smelled peonies in the dead of winter in my bedroom when my dads mom passed. It was her favorite flower and she grew them."

On another page a user reports asking his father for a sign after death, specifically mentioning playing the piano. He says that a while later his own son reported the piano in the house playing by itself. 

On another page a user says that soon after his mother died, "I did see an orange orb in my windowless dark basement." He says, "I then called my sister who explained that on her way home, she saw a ball of light in her SUV."  He also reports "a light shining up from the floor to the ceiling" in a house he had lived in for 20 years without seeing such a thing. 

When I was visiting the first of these pages, I got a spooky effect. The web page flickered like mad, very noticeably, on and on and on.

 The long and very fascinating work Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by former US congressman Robert Dale Owen (which can be read online for free here) is a classic of literature about the paranormal. The 1872 book The Debatable Land Between This World and the Next by the same author is a worthy successor volume of equal length.  In that book on page 468 Owen reports on what we saw at a seance on October 26, 1860. To prevent any trickery, Owen was careful to make sure all the doors to the room were locked, and also made sure that throughout the session all of the four persons present joined each other's hands in the center of the table where they sat. Under such conditions, Owen reported seeing this: 

"After a few minutes, there appeared a luminous body of an irregularly circular form, about four inches in diameter, floating between us and the door which was back of Mrs. Underhill. It was somewhat brighter than when it first appeared on the previous occasion ; that is, on the twenty-first of October."

On the next page, Owen reports that at this session there appeared an illuminated mysterious figure, a kind of grayish cloud that eventually stated "God bless you." On the next page after that, Owen said he saw an outline of a head and face.

Owen recalls seeing in 1867 a luminous female apparition:

"It was a female figure, of medium height, veiled and draped, from head to foot, in white. The drapery did not resemble, in material, anything I have ever seen worn. It gave me, as on a previous occasion, the exact feeling of the Scriptural expression, 'shining raiment.' Its brilliancy was a good deal like that of new-fallen snow, in the sunshine ; recalling the text which declares the garments of Christ, during his transfiguration, to have been ' exceeding white as snow ; ' or, again, it was not unlike the finest and freshest Parian marble with a bright light on it, only more brilliant. It had not at all the glitter of spangles or any shining ornament ; the tone being as uniform as that of a newly-sculptured statue. It stood upright, in a graceful attitude, motionless."

On the next page Owen says, "Then it slowly receded, still facing us, to the center of the opposite wall... gradually diminishing in brightness ; and finally it vanished before my eyes."  Owen later says, "Certain it is, that I beheld the gradual formation of the figure ; that I witnessed its movements ; that I received from its hand an actual flower ;  that I saw the figure disappear."

On page 484 we have this account, mentioning Estelle, Mr. Livermore's late wife:

"Mr. L. sealed the windows, sealed and locked the doors, and placed heavy furniture against them ; then searched the room thoroughly and extinguished the gas. Soon came the words : ' I am here in form.' Then a globular light appeared, with crackling sounds. After a time it became a head, veiled : then, but for a single instant only, Mr. L. recognized the features of Estelle. Then a figure was seen : all this being visible by phosphorescent or electrical lights in various parts of the room. During all this time Mr. L. held both of the medium's hands. Then the mode of producing raps was shown : an orange-shaped luminous ball, with blunt point attached, bounding up and down on the table, and the sound, of each rap coinciding with the approach of the ball to the tabletop."

Mr. Livermore reported that a few months later there occurred an equally astonishing appearance of his late wife Estelle:

"The form remained in sight fully half an hour and each movement was distinctly visible. Then came the message : ' Now see me rise. '  And immediately, in full brightness, the figure rose to the ceiling, remained there a few moments suspended ; then gently descending, disappeared.  Afterward she showed herself between us and a mirror. The reflection of the figure in the glass was distinctly visible, the light being so bright as to show the veins in a marble slab beneath.  Here a heavy shower of rain fell, and there was spelled out: ' The atmosphere has changed. I cannot remain in form : ' whereupon both light and figure finally disappeared."

Later Mr. Livermore reports this:

" At last a luminous globe which had remained stationary some six feet to my left floated in front, and came within two feet of me. It was violently agitated, crackling sounds were heard, and a figure became visible by its light. Then there was revealed the full head and face of Estelle, every feature and lineament in perfection, spiritualized in shadowy beauty, such as no imagination can conceive or pen describe. In her hair, above the left temple, was a single white rose ; the hair being apparently arranged with great care. The entire head and face faded and then became visible again, at least twenty times ; the perfection of recognition, in each case, being in proportion to the brilliancy of the light."

On the 68th page of the document here, showing page 182 on the printed page, we have an account from the March 25, 1922 edition of the publication Light.  The account is pretty good from an evidence standpoint. It is an account of what was seen two months earlier. The author (Dorothy Monk) is named, and she tells us that there were eight witnesses of one of the reported anomalies (a spooky mist at a deathbed).  We read this account by the author of seeing her mother's death. 

"The sister who first saw it about this time also saw a large blue globe-like light resting on mother's head, but none of the rest of us could see it. She explained that the  inside appeared all moving and gradually it turned to deep purple and faded out. About seven o’clock that evening mother’s lips parted and from that time we gradually saw a thick white mist collect above her head and spread across the head of the bed. It came from the top of her head, but collected more thickly to the opposite side of the bed to which she was lying. It hung like a cloud of white steam, sometimes so thick we could scarcely see the bed rails, but continually it was varying although it moved so slowly as to be scarcely perceptible. I and my five sisters were still with her all saw it distinctly, also my brother and one brother-in-law. The blue lights continued about the room, also tiny flashes of yellow, like sparks, appeared sometimes. All this time mother’s lower jaw gradually fell a little. For some hours we saw little difference except that a halo of pale yellow light rays came round her head; there were about seven in number; they varied in length from twelve to twenty inches at different times. By midnight every-thing had cleared off, but she did not die until 7.17 on the morning of January 2nd."

Charlton Templeman Speer claims to have witnessed a variety of paranormal phenomena at seances of William Stainton Moses, a 19th-century figure greatly admired for his scholarship and moral character. One thing he claims to have witnessed is something resembling teleportation. He states this:

"The passage of matter through matter was sometimes strikingly demonstrated by the bringing of various articles from other rooms, though the doors were closed and bolted. Photographs, picture-frames, books, and other objects were frequently so brought, both from  rooms on the same floor and from those above. How they came through the closed doors I cannot say, except by some process of de-materialisation, but come they certainly did, apparently none the worse for the process, whatever it might have been."

Besides also describing numerous inexplicable scents and mysterious music, Speer tells us that orbs were seen rising up from the ground and apparently passing through a heavy table.  We read this:

"These lights were of two different kinds— objective and subjective. The former usually resembled small illuminated globes, which shone brightly and steadily, often moved rapidly about the room, and were visible to all the sitters. A curious fact in connection with these lights always struck me, viz., that looking on to the top of the table one could see a light slowly ascending from the floor, and to all appearance passing out through the top of the table — the table itself apparently not affording any obstacle to one’s view of the light. It is a little difficult to explain my meaning exactly, but had the top of the table been composed of plain glass, the effect of the ascending light, as it appealed to one’s organs of vision, would have been pretty much the same as it was, seen through the solid mahogany. Even then, to make the parallel complete, it would be necessary to have a hole in the glass top of the table, through which the light could emerge. The subjective lights were described as being large masses of luminous vapour floating round the room and assuming a variety of shapes. Dr. Speer and myself, being of entirely unmediumistic temperaments, were only able to see the objective lights, but Mr. Stainton Moses, Mrs. Speer, and other occasional sitters frequently saw and described those which were merely subjective. Another curious point in relation to the objective lights was that, however brightly they might shine, they never, unlike an ordinary lamp, threw any radiance around them, or illuminated the smallest portion of the surrounding darkness — when it was dark — in the slightest degree."

A researcher named Simon Young has done a survey of people reporting sightings of fairies or anything looking like a fairy. He has produced a 353-long document you can read online at the link here. I am surprised that so many people have provided reports to his survey. Maybe I should revise my previous opinion that there only rarely occurs claims to have sighted something like a fairy.  The accounts were gathered from responses to an online survey form here.

It would be too much work to summarize the more interesting accounts, so I will limit myself to accounts in the survey in which people claimed to have seen orbs.  Some are below:

• Page 20: "They looked like brightly coloured orbs that changed size sometimes. They were always smaller than my hand and the colours varied e.g. blue, red, yellow, green etc."
• Page 22: "We [Mexican and Belgian nationals] saw golden yellow orbs in Tintagel."
• Page 54: "I saw bright green orbs hanging in the air in the bedroom." 
• Page 125: "The orbs swirled about as I sat in the middle of the mattress with sheets wrapped around my lower half,... I found myself in the immediate company of hundreds of floating orbs that were doing wonderful impressions of soap bubbles."
• Page 126: "Moving again the orb passed by my ear and I heard a soft whirring sound that solicited goose bumps to rise on top of my clammy skin. I smiled and giggled aloud with the realization that this was an intelligent, living being, and it was responding in kind to my thoughts."
• Page 128: "I was around eleven years old when a friend and myself saw an orb of light floating above the trees in the back woods where I grew up."
• Page 138: " ‘I saw it flying in a circle like loop on way [sic] and then another through the kitchen window. It was really windy outside after a rainstorm and it moved against the wind. It had an organic movement to it....I want to say if I’m being very objective it was an orb."
• Page 155: "I’ve seen orbs and UFO type things."
• Page 165: "‘Fell asleep, woke up to the sound of bells tinkling. Looked around my room to see a small blue orb floating around for one to two minutes then it faded out."
• Page 175: "It was orb-shaped and looked to be about like one foot in circumference, and its color was a really bright pink....It was like a bright pink orb almost as big as a basketball."
• Page 182 "I have however, now in the last three to five years, begun seeing and experiencing light orbs, light beings, and even capturing them on the security cameras inside my home."
• Page 187: "I also have seen little light orbs floating around at sunset/nighttime." 
• Page 193: "I saw a winged creature in a golden orb playing with my aunt’s cat." 
• Page 199: "In my peripheral vision, I saw this beautiful, adorable, pink orb. It looked like it was fluttering in place, as if it had large butterfly wings. I looked directly at it, and it disappeared. I quickly looked away and it popped back out of nowhere still with fluttering pink wings. I did not see any face or body; it did not let me look directly at it."
• Page 211: "I also saw light orbs twinkling close to the wall and on the ceiling."
• Page 215: "We were on our front lawn at night, and we saw a small orb of orange light moving around in the forest, leaving a trail. It then hovered in one spot, maybe two hundred feet from us, for hours..... Then, night four, I saw several of these orbs, now bluish white, appear from a tree, then they flew, lit up, about one-hundred-and-fifty feet, and stopped directly in front of my house... A closer one appeared to be about three- to four-inches tall, fluttering goldish wings within a bluish orb."
• Page 217: " I walked across the backyard and just had that feeling that something was there and when I turned around, just a few inches above the ground was an orb. It was golden and full of light but inside it you could see swirls of colors such as blues, pinks and purples."
• Page 226: "They were blue orbs. And then they disappeared."
• Page 252: "The children were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of little lights. My youngest daughter had an orb with a visible baby’s face at her feet."
• Page 270: "At the end of my bed and to the right there was an orb, but almost like a sparkle. I would say it was white and yellow."
• Page 276: "A skyblue light, orb-like but with indistinct, fading boundaries flew slowly from behind me into my field of vision, about a foot or two from my face."
• Page 298: "I looked at my closet door and I saw many colorful orbs moving over its surface. There were at least five of them, each one of a different color. I remember the colors green, yellow and pink (and maybe blue and white). " 
• Page 321: "In 2005, an orb of light about six inches in diameter floating about six inches above the floor in our hallway one afternoon. It floated beside me and disappeared before passing near my husband’s shin. We were stunned and I wish I said or greeted this white light ball which seemed to have brighter light planes within it. My husband saw it also, but he only saw it glowing and didn’t notice the planes of brighter or denser light moving within."
• Page 328: " Coming by her side we witnessed the formation of orb-shaped lights of warm colours (red, yellow and green) hovering above my street, quite above the highest building in my neighbourhood but below the clouds. Maybe a hundred metres or lower. It’s hard to tell how big they were from that distance, but probably more than one metre in orb radius...There were six orbs that slowly changed colours, flying in the sky in a manner different from drones, planes or birds. At they were gliding slowly forming a ring, then suddenly they broke the pattern into three pairs circling each other playfully, something like chasing one another....The orbs felt more like living entities than devices or machines, their way of moving and changing colour felt playful and deliberate, like dancing or playing a game."

In a Buddhist work quoted by two UFO researchers, we have the following account of a mysterious orb:

"At midnight one of Japan's greatest saints, Nichiren Shonin (1222-1282), was being escorted to the beach to be executed. Just before the fatal moment, a brilliant sphere as large as the moon flew over, illuminating the landscape. The authorities were so frightened by the apparition that they changed their minds about putting Shonin to death. Instead, they exiled him to Sado Island, though this did not prevent his teachings from spreading. A branch of his teachings, the Sokka-Gakkei, has millions of adherents throughout the world today."

On page 3 of the March 12, 1875 edition of a newspaper, we have an account by Prince Emile De Sayn-Wittgenstein, who seems to be the same person described on the autobiographical page here.  Emile says, "I had, about a year and a half ago, tried in vain to convert a young lady to the belief that, under special conditions, her soul might quit her body and act independently of it." Eventually the woman give Emile one of her gloves, which Emile thought might help facilitate some experiment in which the two of them would test an ability to make a psychic contact with each other even though they were far separated.  Emile says that for weeks he intensely concentrated while holding the glove, thinking of the woman far away.  He reports this:

"I afterwards ascertained that she had often dreamt of me very clearly, and that she even remembered having once seen me writing at my table. Her description of my dress and of the room I occupied answered exactly to the reality. She also confirmed several facts and episodes of her private life, the particulars of which I had obtained in the way described."

Strangely, Emile reports that during what seemed like psychic contact between the two people far separated, he would see what could be described as a mysterious orb: "Every time her spirit answered my call, I felt a pleasant sort of shiver running down my back, while a sort of dim circular light, about as big as a plate, and of a pale, yellowish hue, appeared moving, to and fro near the ceiling."

A yellow mysterious orb? I've photographed 182 of those, as you can see by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. Below is one of 100 photos I have taken of mysterious orbs that seemed to be traveling so fast they exhibited a kind of "string of pearls" effect in which we seem to see multiple position states of a single object. The photo is from my 2015 post here.  

 A similar photo is this photo is from my 2017 post here.

This Frankenstein Folly Would Be a Trail of Tears for Elephants

A recent interview with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro is an interview that may deserve some careful scrutiny given its controversial subject.  The interview is entitled "What ‘de-extinction’ of woolly mammoths can teach us: a Q&A with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro."  Shapiro is the chief science officer of a company that claims that it will attempt to revive from extinction some extinct species such as the wooly mammoth and the dodo. 

Early on Shapiro makes this strange statement: "I’ve really begun to appreciate how the technologies one would need in order to bring back something similar to a mammoth are exactly the types of technologies we need to be able to protect and preserve species that are still alive today but in danger of becoming extinct like the mammoth did."  No, preventing an endangered species from going extinct requires mainly low-tech methods such as stopping hunting of the species and carefully preserving existing members of the species, not high tech methods such as gene-splicing.  Shapiro here is trying to give a benevolent sound to an ethically troubling program of gene-fiddling that will probably be a trail of tears for elephants, for reasons I will explain later in this post. 

In the interview Shapiro eventually gives us a quote that lets us know that when scientists talk about performing a "de-extinction" of the wholly mammoth, they're not really talking about any such thing. She says this:

"What we actually mean when we talk about de-extinction now is using the tools of genome engineering to resurrect the core traits of these species that used to be there. We’re not creating a mammoth. We’re taking an Asian elephant and helping it to become something that is more similar to a mammoth by resurrecting the capacity to live in colder climates."

So evolutionary biologists such as Shapiro are using the word "de-extinction" in a misleading way. When they refer to "de-extinction" they are talking about something that isn't actually de-extinction, but instead the hubris of massive experimental gene fiddling. Getting an elephant to look more like a wooly mammoth sure isn't causing the de-extinction of the wooly mammoth. I guess such language abuse is just what we should expect from evolutionary biologists, who have a long history of using language in misleading ways. One of their main abuses of languages has been to use the phrase "natural selection" to refer to something that is not actually selection. Selection means a choice by a conscious agent. So-called "natural selection" is no such thing, but merely a kind of survival-of-the-fittest effect.  The people who have long been referring to selection that isn't really selection are now referring to a de-extinction that isn't really de-extinction.  I guess that's why the title of the interview uses "de-extinction" in quotation marks, as if trying to say, "Don't take me literally."

A bit later in the interview Shapiro seems to change her story, telling us, "Eriona [Hysolli]’s team — the mammoth team — they understand that we have all of the core technologies that we would need to create a mammoth, but what we need to do is, tune them, tweak them, and make them all apply to elephant cells." Huh? Previously Shapiro said, "we're not creating a mammoth" but now she says "we have all of the core technologies that we would need to create a mammoth." It sounds like she is having trouble getting her story straight. Similarly, Shapiro wrote a book entitled "How to Clone a Mammoth," but in the preface of the book she says "here's the truth, it is not possible to clone a mammoth." Wow, that sure sounds like a very glaring case of failing to get your story straight. 

In the recent interview Shapiro then mentions some work her company is doing on stem cells.  We should not be very impressed here, and we should remember that for twenty-five years we have been promised that some great bonanza of treatments would arise from work with stem cells, a bonanza that never appeared. A story last year in the MIT Technology Review describes 25 years of hype about stem cells, and tells us, "Yet today, more than two decades later, there are no treatments on the market based on these cells. Not one."  

Shapiro sounds as is she has not pondered the paltry results of stem-cell research on humans, because she tries to sell us on the idea  that stem cells are going to be some health bonanza for elephants. She states this:

" Elephant iPSCs [induced pluripotent stem cells] are not only good for mammoth de-extinction, they’re also good for work that people want to do with elephants. We want to be able to help elephants thrive in habitats of today and tomorrow, including habitats that include diseases that have been introduced by people. This provides the capacity to do that."

Despite 25 years of hype about stem cells, scientists have delivered almost nothing in the way of FDA-approved stem cell treatments for humans. The idea that stem cell treatments might play some substantial role in helping to preserve elephants from extinction is laughable. Doing stem-cell treatments on elephants is as impractical an idea as the idea of doing surgery on a great white shark. A visual depiction of the idea may cause you to giggle.  

Later on Shapiro states this:

"There are millions of evolutionary differences between an Asian elephant and a mammoth, and it’s unlikely that making one or two small changes is going to create the mammoth phenotype in an Asian elephant’s genetic background. We need tools for multiplex genome editing, for introducing large fragments of DNA, all of which will have application to using CRISPR gene editing technologies in humans and other species."

The use of "unlikely" here rather than "impossible" is strange, rather like saying, "My novel has a million text differences from yours, so it is unlikely that changing one sentence in my novel will make it into your novel." The quotation above seems to suggest that evolutionary biologists want to "play Frankenstein" doing massive gene-splicing with elephants so that they can get skills that may allow them to "play Frankenstein" doing massive gene-splicing with humans.  We get an ominous "eugenics" kind of vibe here, which has the sound of reckless hubris.  Until the origin of COVID has been proven to be natural, we should be very afraid of such gene-fiddling hubris.  

Shapiro then proceeds to teach one of the most outrageous myths of evolutionary biologists, what I call the Great DNA Myth. This is the false teaching that DNA is a specification for making a human body. For many decades following about 1950 evolutionary biologists have taught this false teaching, which is taught in various different ways:

There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes. 

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

The Genetic Code

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Shapiro uses this language to teach the Great DNA Myth:

"One of the hardest problems in biology right now is understanding how the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts, and that includes disease manifestations. We have hundreds of thousands of human genomes, and we still can’t pinpoint with precision what gene means what phenotype. One of the ways that we’re going to get there is through comparative genomics, and that includes species outside of our own. So if we are building these resources where we have genomes from across the tree of life, and more complete understanding of how DNA translates into the way something looks or acts, we will be able to apply this to making more informed decisions or hypotheses that will drive future experiments to understand the link between genotype and disease."

We have here a statement that teaches the false doctrine that phenotypes (the appearance and behavior of an organism) are specified by DNA (the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome).  This myth that "DNA translates into the way something looks or acts" is the untruth that many evolutionary biologists have been teaching for seventy years. We also have a little bit of excuse-making for why no one has been able to find any specification of the human body or any of its cells in DNA.

The excuse does not hold water. If DNA contained a specification for how to build a body or if "DNA translates into the way something looks or acts," how that worked would have been discovered by about the year 2003, when the Human Genome Project was completed, and very probably long before that year.  The reason why no such thing was discovered is because genotypes do not map to phenotypes,  DNA does not specify how to make an organism or any of its cells, and DNA does not determine how something looks or acts, but merely influences such things. Containing only low-level chemical information and no high-level anatomy information, DNA merely influences how an organism looks or acts. Consequently all talk of "de-extinction" by fiddling with the genomes of existing species is nonsense. 

The promise in Shapiro's statement that we are going to get to some point where we understand "what gene means what phenotype" suggests a nonsensical assumption that there is a one-to-one relation between a gene and an observable characteristic of an organism.  Humans have something like 20,000 genes, and the observable characteristics of an organism are influenced by thousands of genes. But such genes don't specify how you get protein complexes made from combinations of different proteins, nor do they specify how you get the organelles of cells, nor do they specify how you get cells, nor do they specify how you get tissues, nor do they specify how you get organs, nor do they specify how you get organ systems, nor do they specify how you get the overall organization of an organism. 

A fact will help you realize how implausible is the idea expressed in the Shapiro quote above, the idea that we will somehow discover "how the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts" and "how DNA translates into the way something looks or acts" once we have cataloged more genomes "across the tree of life."  The fact is that the genomes of more than 3000 species have already been sequenced. This includes species of every major type, including humans, African elephants, Asian elephants and a vast variety of different species across many different phyla. You can see the full list here. If there was such a mapping between DNA and  "the way something looks or acts," it would have been discovered long ago, and we would know how it worked. 

Below are some quotes from biology authorities and scientists who told us the truth on this matter, contrary to what Shapiro stated:

• On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore, says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.” 
• In an essay pointing out the vast complexities and interlocking dependencies of even simpler aspects of biology such as angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels),  Jonathan Bard of Oxford University states, "It is pushing the boundaries of belief too far to believe that it is helpful to see the genome as holding a program." 
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation for it, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin stated, "DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it." Noting that "the more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery," Lewontin lamented the "evangelical enthusiasm" of those who "fetishized DNA" and misspoke so that "DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule." In another work he stated "the information in DNA sequences is insufficient to specify even a folded protein, not to speak of an entire organism." This was correct: DNA does not even specify the 3D shapes of proteins.
• Physician James Le Fanu states the following:

  
  

  "The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full sequence of genes would reveal the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of life. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover that precisely the reverse is the case. Contrary to all expectations, there is a near equivalence of 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves. It was no less disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of both the mouse and our primate cousins...There is in short nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly has six legs, a pair of wings and a dot-sized brain and that we should have two arms, two legs and a mind capable of comprehending the history of our universe."

The lie that evolutionary biologists have repeatedly told us about DNA (that it is some specification for making a human) is one of the most appalling lies humans have ever been told.  Once we recognize the truth about how limited is the information in DNA, and that DNA contains only low-level chemical information and not high-level anatomical information, we can start to realize the incredibly important truth that biologists do not understand and cannot credibly explain how any adult human body originates. The progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the heads of biologists.

In the light of the reality that biologists do not understand the origin of any human adult body, and also the reality that biologists have no credible explanation for the origin of any adult human mind  (because brains are not a credible explanation for human minds and human memory), we can see what a groundless boast it is when evolutionary biologists claim to understand the origin of the human species. The lack of a DNA or genomic specification for how to make an organism or any of its cells or organs is something that short-circuits the main boasts of evolutionary biologists, showing that they do not have any credible story to tell of how macroevolution could occur.  If DNA does not even give you 20% of the information needed to make a human (and it certainly does not), then all claims that humans evolved from ape-like or chimp-like ancestors mainly by a gradual change in DNA are claims that must be untrue. "DNA as body blueprint" is the lie that evolutionary biologists keep telling because it is very much the lie they needed to tell. 

The diagram below tells us the truth about the level of organization in the human body, and what DNA specifies. Even protein molecules are not fully specified by DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up particular proteins, not the complex three-dimensional shapes of such protein molecules. You can't gene-splice your way to de-extinction, because DNA and its genes don't even take you halfway through this organization pyramid. 

By claiming "the long stretches of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome translate into the way a person or an organism looks and acts," Shapiro seems to have taught the Great DNA Myth in its most extreme and erroneous form, a belief that DNA gives rise not to just the physical body of an organism but also its behavior.  Nothing has come from attempts to explain human behavior by analyzing DNA, nor has anyone explained animal instincts by analyzing DNA. The A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s that make up the genome merely translate into low-level chemicals such as amino acids, not cells or the organelles that make up them, and not organs and not body structures and not behavior. The 20,000 genes in human DNA are each complex inventions mostly consisting of thousands of well-arranged atoms,  but evolutionary biologists have no credible explanation for most of them, because such genes consist of too many well-arranged parts and are only functional when most of those parts are in place and well-arranged.  Evolution does not explain DNA; DNA does not explain bodies; and bodies do not explain minds. 

The Great DNA Myth has also been repeatedly taught by George M.  Church, a founder of Shapiro's company (Colossus Biosciences). In a book he wrote (Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves), Church taught that myth when he incorrectly stated that DNA contains "recipes for making human beings."  On page 4 of the same book, Church taught the erroneous idea that living organisms are "governed by a program" in the genome, the untrue claim that "biological organisms are programmable manufacturing systems," and that "with appropriate changes in their genetic programming, they could be made to produce practically any imaginable artifact." Elsewhere Church referred erroneously to  "the entire instruction book for making and maintaining a human being contained within our DNA." No such instruction book exists in DNA, which contains no anatomy information and does not even have instructions on how to build cells. 

Some of the odd statements Shapiro has made can be understood as PR spin trying to make experimental gene fiddling seem noble. Shapiro has tried to give some benevolent sound to the senseless project of fiddling with the genes of elephants to try to make them more like the wooly mammoth.  Such a project will probably be a nightmare for most elephants involved in it.  This is because the process of experimental gene fiddling will probably produce far more birth defects and monstrosities than anything that might be an improvement. 

As I document in the "Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post here, genes and proteins are incredibly sensitive to small changes, a reality that evolutionary biologists like to ignore because it tends to discredit their boasts of understanding biological origins.  The more sensitive genes and proteins are to small changes, the less credible are claims of the accidental origins of genes and proteins. The biochemistry in organisms is fantastically complex and fine-tuned, a reality that evolutionary biologists avoid discussing because the more you learn about such precise fine-tuning, the less likely you will be to believe the claims of evolutionary biologists. Because biochemistry is fantastically fine-tuned everywhere and biological systems are super-abundant in subtle interdependencies and because biological systems everywhere display the most stratospheric levels of fine-tuned organization and precise functional complexity (which makes gene-splicing enormously risky and hard to get right), the hubris vanity project of trying to fiddle with elephant genes so you can then lie about having reversed the extinction of wooly mammoths is a project that would almost certainly be a "trail of tears" for most of the elephants involved in it. There will probably be very many needless cases of sick elephants or elephants with birth defects.

But we won't hear about such horrors and misery from the spokespeople of the Frankenstein projects, who will always use their PR skills to make the work of their company sound benevolent, no matter how sinister its work may be.  Previously we got from one corporation or one of its chief investors the inaccurate claim that no monkey had died from one of its brain chip implants. The claim was not correct.  Those in charge of the Frankenstein follies will have various ways to keep their very dirty linen hidden from the public, like the imaginary way depicted below:

Shapiro's company Colossal has a plan for making these not-really-mammoths, one that is science fiction nonsense. In a previous interview, Shapiro says, "Colossal’s idea is that they will build an artificial womb that will be capable of growing a mammoth for the two years of gestation."  This is "beam me up, Scotty" fantasy. In the next 50 years  it will be impossible to build a machine that will recreate the miracle of mammalian body construction. There are nations or corporations that know how to make an aircraft carrier, but there is not a nation or corporation that could create a human or mammoth body from a cell or raw materials, without a mother -- because the bodies of mammals are so vastly organized and dynamically complex that the organizational complexity of creating a living body of a large mammal far surpasses the organizational complexity of creating an aircraft carrier and all its jets. 

We do not need evolutionary biologists to be fiddling with the genes of elephants, trying to make them look more like wooly mammoths. We do need evolutionary biologists to start being rigorously honest and candid and consistent in their speech, speaking with only the most stringent accuracy about things such as what is in DNA, and the vast levels of hierarchical organizational and fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence in large organisms.  

Oops, he didn't get his story straight

Rationalization is when someone gives some noble reasons for his actions that are not the real reasons. At the Colossal Biosciences website, we get what sounds like some very glaring examples of rationalization.  We are told some ludicrous story that the company wants to de-extinct wooly mammoths because it will be good for global warming. As part of their explanation of this, we are told that mammoths are good at knocking down trees and shrubs.  The story told is groundless speculation, but I guess it sounds better than saying, "We want to do this gene-splicing because it's fun to play God." 

The project of trying to bring back to life extinct wooly mammoths by gene-fiddling with elephants is as goofy as a plan to try to bring back to life George Washington by digging up his buried corpse and jolting it with electricity, Frankenstein-style.