Every few weeks, I get a fresh comment on an old video I made a about a year ago about Gilbert Ling. It’s low level stuff, remarkable only for the persistent trickle of comments I get, and because there are apparently people on the internet who practically worship this guy, Ling, who most people — even professional biologists — have never heard of.

Quick summary: Ling was an old scientist who, in the 1940s, concluded that the molecular engine that drives ion gradients in cells, the sodium-potassium pump, didn’t exist. That was a reasonable doubt in the ’40s, but became quixotic and bizarre as the evidence accumulated over the subsequent decades. Ling invented an idea he called the Association Induction hypothesis, and later the Polarized-Oriented Multilayer theory of cell water, neither of which have any empirical foundation, while the sodium-potassium pump is one of the better characterized molecules in the cell.

I think that explains the longevity of the support for his crackpottery. People love weird models of water, especially the quacks, who greatly appreciate having a cheap, ubiquitous substance that they can spin mystical jargon around to inflate the appearance of value. There are lots of miracle water claims on the internet, like Gel Water, H₃O₂, and its unlikely chemical structure.

I think I’m getting criticized by quacks who revere Ling as a credentialed scientist who legitimizes their opposition to scientific authorities and provides a pseudoscientific framework for their rationalizations.

Also, all the people whining about the oppression of poor Gilbert Ling can’t read, can’t understand the content of a video even, and can’t comprehend even a lay explanation of a biological phenomenon. This guy, for instance, tries to summarize what I wrote and doesn’t even come close.

Yeah. What I said.

Here’s a provocative idea from Gregory Paul: the churches are dying.

One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier, with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline, theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems.

An anecdotal observation in support of this idea is that I’m seeing a lot of strident, desperate apologetics in my in-box and online, and all of it is stupid. Seriously. William Lane Craig? Lee Strobel? Josh McDowell? Frank Turek? Greg Koukl? These people are the worst, and their arguments are all old and tired. Then there are there followers, who are even worse.

It would be nice to imagine that people are finally waking up, that there is new wave of rationalism that is causing people to abandon old dogmas, that atheism is finally winning. Paul makes a case that that helps, but that it can’t be the main impetus for people losing their religion. Just look around you — is MAGA a rational movement? Is the American government a shining beacon of reason?

Paul argues that there is something else driving people out of the churches.

But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….

Aliens.

Especially, ancient aliens.

Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion.

He points out lots of circumstantial evidence for that. There’s this new wave of gullibility demonstrated in popular TV programming. How can Ancient Aliens be so popular? I tried watching Graham Hancock once, and couldn’t cope with his combination of ignorance and confidence. Science fiction and fantasy have taken over the movies, which us SF fans might think is benign, except we aren’t wondering why people flocked to Star Wars.

Paul is also a science popularizer, and he’s running into a rising class of inquiry. Did ancient aliens kill the dinosaurs? That’s a question I never even thought of until now.

While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot.

Come to think of it, I was also surprised by how many people have asked me whether octopus were of alien origin, an idea I would never have taken seriously.