A Sting in the Tail for Creationism

Illustration of a female Xenomorphia resurrecta ovipositing into a puparium.

Parasitoid biology preserved in mineralized fossils | Nature Communications.

The nasty designer has been at it for years!

It's been at it for tens of millions of years in fact; way before there were humans or anything like humans - which is a bit of a problem for creationists who kneejerk 'The Fall' as the excuse for why their putative intelligent designer designed such nasty little things as parasitic wasps which eat their hosts alive, killing them only when they've finished with them.

We know this because of the the work of a large team of specialists working on a project coordinated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany, led by Thomas van de Kamp. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Communications, along with some clever animations.

They used ultrafast x-ray imaging to examine 1,500 fossilised fly larva from mineralised collections held at the Natural History Museum of Basel and the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet of Stockholm and found 55 cases of parasitism, four of them by previously unknown extinct species of endoparasitic wasp that lived between 23 and 66 million years ago.

These specimens had been collected in 1944 in phosphorite mines in France, by Swiss entomologist Eduard Handschin, who suspected at the time that he could discern the outline of a parasitic wasp in a thin section of one of the samples, but could not prove it.

Modern technology has now confirmed his suspicion.

One of the problems with tracing the origin of these parasitic wasps has been their comparative rarity in the fossil records since neither they nor their hosts fossilise easily and when they have been found, the difficulties of showing a parasite inside the fossil has been difficult, as Handschin found. This new technique not only makes it much easier but makes these amazing images and animations possible. It also shows that there is a vast reserve of specimens in museum drawers and archives that can now be re-examined with these new techniques.

Endoparasitic wasps have various strategies for parasitising other insects and spiders, either injecting an egg directly into the living insect, capturing and paralysing it and laying an egg on it so the grub can burrow into it, or, in this case laying an egg through the pupa case so that instead of a fly emerging, an adult wasp emerges. Several of these strategies are described in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

It is estimated that some 50% of all known species are parasites very many of which are endoparasitic wasps of the order Hymenoptera. As I pointed out in a recent article on oak galls and oak gall wasps, there are some 13,000 gall wasps alone and not only are they parasitic on plants, they are also subject to parasitism by other wasps.

According to creationists, the reason their supposed creator god makes parasites is because it never managed to get over the indignation of a couple of human ancestors eating an apple from its favourite tree. Apparently, this so obsessed it that it created as many parasitic species to make life unpleasant for the original creation as there were species in existence already. Strangely though, it started doing this tens of millions of years before there were any ancestors of humans that could be called human, or even sentient, let alone capable of talking to snakes and understanding instructions.

But of course that's not the only thing about parasites that calls into question the character and abilities of the alleged and surely mis-named Intelligent Designer. Not only is it obsessively vindictive and unforgiving but appears to have designed the punishment before it designed the apple-thieves, so it must have planned to design them that way.

But, joking aside (because surely people don't really take that stuff seriously, do they?) there is no way that parasites make any sense as an intelligent piece of design, especially when the species they parasitise is also the work of the same designer and, in a classic arms race, ways of resisting the parasite will have been part of its design, as will measures to overcome those defenses be part of the parasites' designs with evidence of multiple iterations of designing defences and overcoming those defenses.

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