In a recent paper published in Biocontaminant, a group of environmental and public health scientists from China and the United States warn of the growing threat to public health from a group of dangerous free-living single-celled amoebae, the most notorious of which is Naegleria fowleri, also known as the brain-eating amoeba.
This complex, eukaryotic organism bears all the hallmarks of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe insist is compelling evidence for intelligent design — complex specified genetic information and irreducible complexity — so, if we accept their argument, we have to conclude that whatever designer they imagine is doing this designing must also be the one who designed these nasty little ways to make people sick and die by having their brains eaten, like in some grotesque zombie apocalypse.
This pathogenic amoeba is not new — I wrote about it in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is not Good, page 33, based on a blog post I originally wrote in 2015. Since then, assisted by global warming, ageing water-supply infrastructure, and a lack of effective monitoring, the amoeba has become a global threat to public health.
N. fowleri normally lives in soil and water, where it feeds on bacteria and other micro-organisms, but if it manages to get into a victim’s nose it can track along the olfactory nerves to the brain, where it treats brain cells the way it treats soil-borne organisms and sets about eating them. Infections are almost invariably fatal. What makes them particularly dangerous is their ability to survive extreme conditions that would kill most micro-organisms, such as high temperatures and strong disinfectants like chlorine, so they can persist in water supplies that most people regard as safe.
An additional hazard is that these amoebae can also act as carriers for other pathogens such as Legionella pneumophila, Chlamydia, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. By providing these pathogens with protection from disinfection, the amoeba can enhance their pathogenicity and prolong their survival in the environment.
It would be hard to find a better example than N. fowleri of what creationists insist must be intelligently designed, so it follows that there are probably few better examples of the sheer malevolent evil of any designer of such creatures, from the perspective of the humans infected with it. For creationists to retreat into the traditional excuse of blaming ‘the Fall’ is to abandon the claim that irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information are definitive evidence of intelligent design, and to retreat instead into religious fundamentalism and Bible literalism.
Naegleria fowleri^ Evolution, Distribution, and Spread. Naegleria fowleri is a free-living, thermophilic amoeba that evolved as a bacterial predator in warm freshwater and soil, not as a human parasite. It belongs to the genus Naegleria, an ancient lineage of eukaryotes that likely diverged hundreds of millions of years ago. Its ability to destroy human brain tissue is an accidental by-product of enzymes and feeding mechanisms that evolved to digest microbial prey; humans are an evolutionary dead end for the organism.The warning from the environment and public health scientists is also spelled out in a news release from Biochar Editorial Office, Shenyang Agricultural University, made available through EurekAlert!.
Historically, N. fowleri was confined mainly to warm freshwater environments in tropical and subtropical regions, with most reported cases in the southern United States, Australia, parts of Africa, India, and South America. Infections were rare and geographically clustered around warm lakes, rivers, and hot springs.
Over the last few decades, its range has expanded. Cases have appeared progressively further north in the United States and sporadically in parts of Europe and Asia. This shift is strongly associated with rising water temperatures driven by climate change, longer and more intense heatwaves, ageing water infrastructure, and increased human exposure through recreational water use and inadequately disinfected domestic water systems. Improved molecular detection has also increased recognition of its presence. Together, these trends indicate a real and growing public-health risk from a pathogen whose ecology is being reshaped by environmental change.
Why this matters for Intelligent Design claims
From an evolutionary perspective, N. fowleri is exactly what one would expect:
- A free-living microorganism adapted to warm freshwater
- With feeding mechanisms that become lethally destructive when misapplied to human tissue
- Whose spread tracks environmental change, infrastructure decay, and climate warming
From an Intelligent Design perspective, however, it is a spectacularly awkward example:
- It shows “irreducible complexity” and intricate molecular machinery.
- It serves no conceivable human benefit.
- It causes an appalling, rapidly fatal disease.
- It is becoming more prevalent as environmental conditions change.
In other words, it looks precisely like a contingent evolutionary product of natural selection and ecological drift — not like the handiwork of a benevolent or even minimally competent designer.
Invisible but deadly: Scientists warn of a growing global threat from amoebae in water and the environment
A group of environmental and public health scientists is sounding the alarm on a largely overlooked but increasingly dangerous group of pathogens: free living amoebae. In a new perspective article published in Biocontaminant, the researchers highlight how these microscopic organisms are becoming a growing global public health threat, fueled by climate change, aging water infrastructure, and gaps in monitoring and detection.
Amoebae are single celled organisms commonly found in soil and water. While most are harmless, some species can cause devastating infections. Among the most notorious is Naegleria fowleri, often referred to as the brain eating amoeba, which can trigger a rare but almost always fatal brain infection after contaminated water enters the nose during activities such as swimming.
What makes these organisms particularly dangerous is their ability to survive conditions that kill many other microbes. They can tolerate high temperatures, strong disinfectants like chlorine, and even live inside water distribution systems that people assume are safe.
Longfei Shu, corresponding author
School of Environmental Science and Engineering,
State Key Laboratory for Biocontrol,
Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
The authors also emphasize that amoebae act as hidden carriers for other harmful microbes. By sheltering bacteria and viruses inside their cells, amoebae can protect these pathogens from disinfection and help them persist and spread in drinking water systems. This so called Trojan horse effect may also contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance.
Climate warming is expected to worsen the problem by expanding the geographic range of heat loving amoebae into regions where they were previously rare. Recent outbreaks linked to recreational water use have already raised public concern in several countries.
The researchers call for a coordinated One Health approach that connects human health, environmental science, and water management. They urge stronger surveillance, improved diagnostic tools, and the adoption of advanced water treatment technologies to reduce risks before infections occur.Amoebae are not just a medical issue or an environmental issue. They sit at the intersection of both, and addressing them requires integrated solutions that protect public health at its source.
Longfei Shu.
Publication:Zheng J, Hu R, Shi Y, He Z, Shu L. 2025.
The rising threat of amoebae: a global public health challenge. Biocontaminant 1: e015 doi: 10.48130/biocontam-0025-0019
For creationists and intelligent-design advocates, Naegleria fowleri is an awkward little organism to explain away. It displays precisely the kind of biochemical sophistication, coordinated molecular machinery, and environmental resilience that William Dembski and Michael Behe insist can only be the product of an intelligent designer. And yet what this “design” actually delivers is a creature that accidentally invades human brains and eats them, with a fatality rate approaching 100%. If this is the handiwork of a designer, then it is not merely incompetent, but grotesquely malevolent.
The evolutionary explanation, by contrast, fits the facts effortlessly. N. fowleri is a free-living amoeba adapted to warm freshwater environments, equipped with enzymes and feeding mechanisms that evolved to digest bacteria and other microorganisms. That these same mechanisms become lethally destructive when misapplied to human neural tissue is exactly what one would expect from a blind, contingent evolutionary process. Humans are an accidental host, an evolutionary dead end for the organism, and its increasing prevalence tracks environmental change, climate warming, ageing infrastructure, and altered patterns of human exposure — not the intentions of any supernatural agent.
As so often, the evidence stubbornly refuses to cooperate with creationist dogma. Faced with examples like N. fowleri, creationists can either abandon their claims that irreducible complexity and complex specified information are reliable indicators of intelligent design, or retreat into the theological get-out clause of blaming “the Fall”, so exposing the fact that ID is Bible-literalism dressed in a lab coat. Either way, the scientific reality remains the same: this is exactly the kind of organism evolution predicts, and exactly the kind of organism a benevolent or competent designer would not.
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