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| The photo of the American centipede shared on Twitter. The fungi can be seen in the small red circles towards the top. Credit: Derek Hennen. |
Discoveries like this present intelligent [sic] design creationists with two choices.
They can either accept that their putative designer creates things because it hates some of its creation and behaves like a malevolent influence in the World who actively seeks to increase suffering in ever-more inventive ways, or things like this evolve naturally while their god just sits back and allows it to happen.
Neither of these choices leave their designer resembling an omnibenevolent god who wishes to minimise the amount of suffering or who loves its creation.
What we have here is a newly-discovered fungal parasite that appears to live exclusively on the genitalia of millipedes. It was discovered by a researcher from the University of Copenhagen whilst looking at photos on Twitter and is appropriately named Troglomyces twitteri as a result. A Copenhagen University Newsletter explains:
One day when biologist and associate professor Ana Sofia Reboleira of the State Natural History Museum scrolled around Twitter, she fell over a photo of an American centipede that her colleague Derek Hennen of Virginia Tech in the United States had shared. And here she spotted a few tiny dots that were striking in her trained eyes.
“I could see something on the centipede that looked like a sponge. But at this point, these kinds of fungi had never been found on American centipedes. So I went in to my colleague and showed him the picture, and then we both ran into the museum collections and started digging, ”Ana Sofia tells Reboleira.
She and colleague Henrik Enghoff found several specimens of the same fungus on some of the American centipedes that the huge biological collection at the State Natural History Museum holds. Mushrooms that no one had previously documented. And it confirmed that it was a new species of Laboulbeniales - an order of tiny, bizarre and so far rather unknown sponges infecting insects and centipedes.
The newly discovered sponge fungus has now been given the official Latin name of Troglomyces twitteri.
[...]
The Laboulbeniales fungi do not really resemble fungi, but more [like] tiny larvae. The [fungi] are also in a class entirely separate, among other things. because they live externally on the body of certain host animals and even specific places on the body - in this case, on the genitals of the centipede. The fungus nourishes [itself from] the host animal by piercing the host's outer shell with a special suction while half of the fungus protrudes.
The group of Laboulbeniales fungi that roam at exactly the same millennium is known about 30 species. The vast majority have only been discovered since 2014. However, according to Ana Sofia Reboleira, there are probably a number of those that have not been discovered yet. Laboulbeniales is a very under-researched area of research.
So, some 30 species of these bizarre fungi discovered so far in just the last 6 years. Obviously, if you believe that superstitious nonsense, the work of a somewhat obsessive designer who has a bizarre obsession with millipedes.
Alternatively, a class of fungi has evolved to exploit a number of specialised biological niche in the genitalia of millipedes and has diversified into them without any plan or intent, and biological science is only just discovering them.
It's totally bizarre that those who purport to worship a loving god have no difficulty with believing it would design things like this because of something a legendary (and biologically impossible) ancestral couple supposedly did, whilst still pretending that the intelligent [sic] design notion is serious science and an alternative to evolution as a scientific theory. Tweet
You seem to forget that most theists (namely Christians, as it is the largest religion) have a perfect Creation followed by a death curse coupled with a thorns curse. We are supposed to have disease in the world right now. Thinking on these things helps us to restrain our behavior. It does if we let it.
ReplyDeleteNot sure why you think I forgot that. It's amusing though that when the Discovery Institute works so hard to fool people into believing that ID is real science, so should be taught in science class as an alternative to the TOE, IDiots keep reminding us that it's Christian fundamentlist Bible literalism dressed in a lab coat, as you have just done.
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