Malevolent Designer News - How Dodder Eavesdrops on its Host

Dodder, Cuscuta australis, on a soybean host plant: The parasite is flowering and has already produced seed capsules. It uses its host’s flowering signal for flower formation.

Photo credit: Jingxiong Zhang,
Kunming Institute of Botany,
Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dodder uses the flowering signal of its host plant to flower | Max Planck Institute
for Chemical Ecology.

Not content with designing a parasitic plant that steals nutrients and water from its host, Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer has designed dodder to steal their hormones too!

To the embarrassment of creationists this redesign appears to have involved a loss of genetic information too - something they say can't result in an increase in information or be beneficial to the organism. The latest dictat from the Discovery Institute, following the abysmal failure of the Intelligent Design hoax, is that all genetic change must be presented as 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' from an initial perfect creation, so it can be presented as consistent with the Bible and Michael J. Behe's latest book.

The Dodders are a group of 201 flowering plants of the Cuscuta genus within the Convolvulus (Convolvulaceae - morning glory, bindweed, etc.) family, that are all obligate parasites with no leaves, so don't photosynthesise. Once they have established a connection to a host plant via a haustorium, their root shrivels and dies, so they are then entirely dependent on their host for nutrients and water.

However, they are known to coordinate their flowering with that of their host, so they have all the benefits of an optimal flowering period that their host does and will have enough time to produce seeds while the host produces its own seeds. Normally, flowering plants detect the optimal conditions to start flowering through their leaves which produce a signal hormone called Flowering Locus T (FT) which stimulates the apical cells on a shoot to start making flowers. However, the dodders have no leaves, so the question was, how is this synchronicity achieved, and here the malevolent genius of creationism's intelligent [sic] designer is revealed in all its glory (if you believe that stuff).

Researchers at the Jena-based Max Planck Institute's partner organisation, the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have shown that the dodder, C. australis, not only pinches its host's water and nutrients, it also pinches its FT hormone. They showed this by attaching a florescent green protein to the FT produced by host plants and showed that it transports through the hautorium to the dodders apical cells.

Their findings were published a few days ago in PNAS, sadly behind an expensive paywall.

This adaptation appears to have been accompanied by a loss of the genes for making FT in dodder while retaining the FT receptors on the apical cells. This represents evolution by loss of genetic evolution - something creationist dogma says can't happen. It also represents a gain in information by loss of genes - again, something creationist dogma says can't happen. Of course, reducing the metabolic workload of producing its own FT at the expense of its host, is an evolutionary advantage to dodder and not a 'degradation' or 'devolution'. It is just another example of how parasite evolution tends to include a reduction in complexity and loss of genetic information.

Yet again, science has refuted creationism, quite incidentally and without intent, simply by discovering the facts, and whatever imaginary creator deity intelligent [sic] design advocates purport to worship would have to be regarded as malevolent and casually uncaring for its creation, if it really existed.

I will be dealing with very many of these examples in my forthcoming, richly illustrated book, "The Malevolent Designer: Why Natures's God is not Good", the sequel to my popular book, "The Unintelligent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax".

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