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| David's myotis bat Myotis davidii Source: Biodiversity Data Journal |
Bats have a unique immune system that enables them to play host to a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for the current coronavirus pandemic) while not being harmed by at and, more importantly from the virus' point of view, not killing it either.
In this way, the virus is free to mutate and replicate and, when a mutation which can live in another species arises, can transfer to that other species, the way SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have transferred to humans.
As I said in my latest book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, it is as though Creationism's putative magic invisible designer has set bats up as a pathological virus factory and test bed for developing nasty little viruses to make humans and other animals sick and die, like some bitter and twisted evil genius, full of hate for its creation, who now spends its time devising ways to increase the pain and suffering in the world.
One of the ways in which nasty viruses like SARS-CoV-2 have been 'designed' is to provoke an over-reaction in our immune system which actually does a lot of the damage - the so-called kinase cascade. In other words, these viruses have been 'designed' to turn our natural defences (also designed by the same intelligent [sic] designer, according to Creationist dogma) against us. Now researches have worked out how bats have been 'designed' to prevent this over-reaction. The press release from the Duke-National University of Singapore (NUS) explains:Bats’ Superior Immune System.
We’ve already seen, in relation to SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) how bats appear to be immune to these viruses, so can act as incubators for new strains to arise, such as the one currently killing hundreds of thousands of people world-wide and wrecking economies (50).
Figure 48 Brown Long-eared bat, Plecotus auritus
© Catherine Webber-Hounslow
Now we learn that bats have an immune system that is much more effective than that of almost all other mammals, including humans(51) . Although it is very good at recognising foreign RNA, in viruses for example, it is not so good at recognising foreign DNA, which dampens the inflammatory response that does so much damage, especially in humans infected with SARS-CoV-2. The genes that control those responses have probably (according to evolutionary biologists) been purified by natural selection because bats live in a wide range of ecological niches and exploit multiple prey species, including many different species of insects.
According to ID advocates, however, evolution by natural selection cannot account for these differences – they must have been intelligently designed.
So, as with the elephant’s immunity to cancer, Creationism’s putative designer chose to give all but bats an inferior immune system, the better to allow the pathogens it designed to do what they were designed to do – make us and other animals sick.
Bats act as reservoirs of numerous zoonotic viruses, including SARS-CoV, MERS CoV, Ebola virus, and—most likely—SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen behind the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. However, the molecular mechanisms bats deploy to tolerate pathogenic viruses has remained unclear.
Now scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, have discovered novel molecular mechanisms that allow bats to tolerate zoonotic viruses without getting sick. Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study suggests that bats adopt unique strategies to prevent overactive immune responses, which protects them against diseases caused by zoonotic viruses.
The team examined three bat species—Pteropus alecto (black fruit bat), Eonycteris spelaea (cave nectar bat), and Myotis davidii (David's myotis bat)—and identified mechanisms that balance the activity of key proteins that play a major role in mediating immunity and inflammatory responses in mammals. These mechanisms enable bats to harbour and transmit zoonotic pathogens without setting off the detrimental consequences of immune activation.
One of the mechanisms bats use is to reduce the levels of caspase-1, a protein that triggers a key inflammatory cytokine protein, interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β). Another mechanism they employ hampers the maturation of interleukin-1 beta cytokines through a finely-tuned balancing between caspase-1 and IL-1β.
What is more, despite Creationist dogma that a loss of DNA is invariably detrimental and therefore evolution by such loss is impossible, bats appear to have done just that with the complete loss of the regulatory AIM2 gene which, in humans, senses the foreign DNA in the cell and triggers an immune response. It seems that, having designed an immune system to protect us, the Intelligent Designer designed some viruses to use it against us by provoking an over-response, then saved bats by breaking it.
So now, bats can become infected with these harmful viruses but not suffer the harm we and other mammals suffer. Meanwhile the viruses can live and replicate inside bat cells mutating away harmlessly and evolving by genetic drift, until a chance combination makes it able to leave the bat and start killing other mammals. Multiply this by a few million bats and it is easy to see why these pathogenic viruses arise so frequently.
Creationists find an entity capable of designing these systems to be worthy of praise and adoration and regard it as the source of their morals. Perhaps we're fortunate that this entity only exists in the imagination of scientifically illiterate Creationists who have been raised to regard magic as science and think this is a far more credible explanation than a perfectly rational, natural explanation involving nothing more than the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics.
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