In the course of writing Skeptophilia for nearly fifteen years, I thought I'd run into every purveyor of woo out there.
I was wrong.
Somehow, I missed a guy named Gregg Braden, but that error on my part was rectified by a long-time follower, who sent me a link to a YouTube video with the message, "Fasten your seatbelt."
What I needed, as it turns out, was not a seatbelt, but a pillow to cushion my forehead from the repeated faceplants I did while watching it. The video is a conversation between Braden and a woman called Theresa Bullard-Whyke of "Quantum Minds TV" that should win some kind of award for the Most Skillful Blend of Scientific Half-Truths With Complete Bullshit Ever Produced.
To take just one example, Braden and Bullard-Whyke describe a phenomenon called DNA packing, which is a well-studied feature of our genetic material. It's been estimated that each of us has enough DNA that if it were stretched out end to end, it would measure a hundred trillion meters -- about three hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So to put it mildly, the stuff has to be wrapped pretty tightly. There are a number of ways this is accomplished, but one of the main ones is that the DNA spools around a protein complex called histone, which assembles into a lattice that forms the scaffolding of our chromosomes.
Braden then goes into how this is one of the ways we control gene expression. We have an estimated twenty thousand protein-encoding genes in our genome (depending on exactly how you define the term, and whether you include sequences that up-regulate or down-regulate other genes), but less than one percent of them are active in any particular tissue at a given time. When DNA is tightly coiled up into what is called heterochromatin, it is effectively inactivated; the enzymes required for transcribing it into mRNA (the first step of protein production) simply can't get at it. Ergo: the genes in that region are shut off.
So far, so good.
But then Braden and Bullard-Whyke take that information, and run right off the cliff with it.
Braden seems to think this gene shutoff is a bad thing, and that we'd have "superpowers" (yes, he used that word) if we could somehow get all those closed-down genes to turn back on again. The reality, of course, is that in a healthy human, those switched-off genes are switched off for a reason; a lot of them are developmental genes that spur rapid cell division and are critical during early organ formation in embryos, but if turned back on would trigger cancer. (Some oncogenes -- cancer-promoting genes -- do their dirty work more or less by this mechanism.)
Then Braden goes into an inadvertently hilarious claim that positive emotions cause your DNA to relax, and negative ones make it tighten up. Experience positive emotions, he says, and your DNA will get all loosey-goosey and more of your genes will turn on. Negative emotions makes the DNA "get knotted up," and genes turn off. "It's influenced by your breath," he says.
Then he enthusiastically launched into describing an alleged experiment where some scientists (unnamed, of course) found that if you have photons in a vacuum, they are all random, but if you introduce DNA into the vacuum, they "all become aligned." "This experiment conclusively proves," Bullard-Whyke said, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, "that DNA informs the quantum vacuum."
Well, as someone who is reasonably conversant both in biology and in physics, allow me simply to say that of all the things in the history of the universe that never happened, this experiment is the one that never happened the most.
But that didn't stop Braden and Bullard-Whyke, who went on to make the highly logical argument that if (1) your emotions can turn on your DNA, and (2) DNA informs the photons in the quantum vacuum (whatever the fuck that even means), then (3) what you experience might activate not only your own DNA, but that of people around you.
"When we live in fear," Braden says, "we're tightening our chromatin, and it influences the gene expression not only in ourselves, but in those we come into contact with."
So I hereby wish to issue an apology to anyone who has had to deal with me when I was in a bad mood, and who experienced massive gene shut-down as a result. I will definitely try to improve how my biophotons are informing the quantum vacuum in the future.
What completely destroyed what little faith I have left in humanity's intellectual potential, though, was when I looked at the comments section for the video, and found stuff like this:
- Once again, Gregg, you have gone above and beyond expectations in your discoveries and studies with our Humanity and Universe and how it is all connected within us. We are definitely in a beautiful shift as human beings. Thank you for all that you do and teach.
- Outstanding content! The evolved healers shomons [sic] high level alchemy and the new yet the ancient! The connection between heart and brain and the conductor to everything else in the field!
- The most awaited golden age is almost here meaning the light is turning off for humanity so that we can have access to our true self in this dimension & beyond! This is the time to care over being scare [sic]!
- Yes, I know this to be true - and all the creation stories are true, and not myth as we have believed. I have known this for years. And now Gregg Braden has presented the scientific proof.
- Apparently we can manifest our physical reality out of thin air, that's what I want to learn and unlock. Highly evolved beings throughout the universe can connect with the field that makes up the universe and travel great distances in the blink of an eye and manifest creations from thought through the field into physical being in an instant. If they can do it, the message I'm receiving is that we can too. Can someone please figure this out and make tutorial videos?
Yes, please do make some tutorials! I'll bring the snacks and a bottle of scotch. First person who teleports a great distance in the blink of an eye wins.
Oh, and I should mention that while looking into this guy, I found out he was recently on The Joe Rogan Experience (because of course he was), wherein he claimed that NASA is covering up evidence of a fifty-thousand-year-old human civilization on the Moon. He also apparently has written a book about how the name of God and the periodic table are both somehow encoded in the nucleotide sequence of our DNA.
So. Yeah. I don't know how I missed Gregg Braden, but he definitely is right up there with David Icke, Diane Tessman, and Richard C. Hoagland in the "I Make Up For In Confidence What I Lack In Accuracy" department. But for those of us in the studio audience, can I once again urge you to look into what the actual scientists are saying on a topic before you fall for people like this? I mean, if you're not up to reading technical journal articles on the topic -- which, let's face it, most of us aren't -- at least peruse the fucking Wikipedia page, okay?
Because seeing people praising this guy is making my photons go all higgledy-piggledy, and it's gonna shut all my wife's genes off. She gets really cranky when that happens.
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