Malevolent Designer News - A Nasty Little Trick for Making Malignant Melanomas

Melanoma

VAI Study reveals source of DNA mutations in melanoma - VAI

Creationist mode:

Back in 2014 I wrote an article about malignant melanoma, inspired by a holiday on the Côte d'Azur, explaining why people with pale skin are at risk because of poor 'design' creating the need for a balance between getting melanoma and producing enough Vitamin D in the skin to avoid rickets due to Vitamin D deficiency. In Eurasia, where the sun is lower in the sky, meaning it has more atmosphere to travel through, and the weather is more cloudy, than in our ancestral homelands in Africa, pushed this balance towards pale skin and therefore an increased risk of melanomas.

Now, however, judging by the way creationists seem to admire the many examples of malevolence in their beloved, putative intelligent [sic] designer, there may be another reason - mendacity and delight in watching us suffer, if we buy into this childish explanation for a moment...

So, if you've been taken in by the Intelligent Design Hoax and believe that nothing of this sort ever happens without the positive intervention of a magic designer to make it happen, and that this magic designer is an omniscient god, then you must accept that the recent findings of a research group at the Van Andel Institute (VAI), Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, point to deliberation and not accident - which is excluded by the dogma of omniscience.

There is still the same design fault and the need for a clunky workaround of course, but the findings upend the long-held assumption that melanomas begin with copying accidents in DNA due to the direct damaging effects of sunlight, and show that the mechanism is rather more complex and sophisticated - sunlight causes a chemical change in the DNA which makes it much more susceptible to mutation, so, once the melanoma gets going, it produces a cancer with far more DNA mutations, and therefor harder to combat, than other cancers, making it especially virulent. Clever, eh?

The news release from VAI explains:

Cancers result from DNA mutations that allow defective cells to survive and invade other tissues. However, in most cases, the source of these mutations is not clear, which complicates development of therapies and prevention methods. In melanoma, we’ve now shown that damage from sunlight primes the DNA by creating ‘premutations’ that then give way to full mutations during DNA replication.

Safe sun practices are very important. In our study, 10–15 minutes of exposure to UVB light was equivalent to what a person would experience at high noon, and was sufficient to cause premutations. While our cells have built-in safeguards to repair DNA damage, this process occasionally lets something slip by. Protecting the skin is generally the best bet when it comes to melanoma prevention.

Professor Gerd P. Pfeifer, Ph.D., Lead author
Van Andel Institute,
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

Melanoma is a serious type of skin cancer that begins in pigment-producing skin cells. Although less common than other types of skin cancer, melanoma is more likely to spread and invade other tissues, which significantly reduces patient survival. Previous large-scale sequencing studies have shown that melanoma has the most DNA mutations of any cancer. Like other skin cancers, melanoma is linked to sun exposure, specifically a type of radiation called UVB. Exposure to UVB damages skin cells as well as the DNA within cells.

Most cancers are thought to begin when DNA damage directly causes a mutation that is then copied into subsequent generations of cells during normal cellular replication. In the case of melanoma, however, Pfeifer and his team found a different mechanism that produces disease-causing mutations — the introduction of a chemical base not normally found in DNA that makes it prone to mutation.

DNA comprises four chemical bases that exist in pairs— adenine (A) and thymine (T), and cytosine (C) and guanine (G). Different sequences of these pairs encode all of the instructions for life. In melanoma, the problem occurs when UVB radiation from the sun hits certain sequences of bases — CC, TT, TC and CT — causing them to chemically link together and become unstable. The resulting instability causes a chemical change to cytosine that transforms it into uracil, a chemical base found in the messenger molecule RNA but not in DNA. This change, called a “premutation,” primes the DNA to mutate during normal cell replication, thereby causing alterations that underlie melanoma.

These mutations may not cause disease right away; instead, they may lay dormant for years. They also can accumulate as time goes on and a person’s lifetime exposure to sunlight increases, resulting in a tough-to-treat cancer that evades many therapeutic options.

It takes a real evil genius to come up with something like that. If you have pale skin, you have a choice between suffering from a serious Vitamin deficiency or opening yourself up to that sneaky little trick and dying of a particularly nasty cancer! What more could a malevolent, misanthropic evil designer wish for? Heads, he wins; tails, you lose!

Creationist mode:

Back in the real world, the scientists have published their findings, open access, in the journal Science Advances:

Abstract
Sunlight-associated melanomas carry a unique C-to-T mutation signature. UVB radiation induces cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) as the major form of DNA damage, but the mechanism of how CPDs cause mutations is unclear. To map CPDs at single-base resolution genome wide, we developed the circle damage sequencing (circle-damage-seq) method. In human cells, CPDs form preferentially in a tetranucleotide sequence context (5′-Py-T<>Py-T/A), but this alone does not explain the tumor mutation patterns. To test whether mutations arise at CPDs by cytosine deamination, we specifically mapped UVB-induced cytosine-deaminated CPDs. Transcription start sites (TSSs) were protected from CPDs and deaminated CPDs, but both lesions were enriched immediately upstream of the TSS, suggesting a mutation-promoting role of bound transcription factors. Most importantly, the genomic dinucleotide and trinucleotide sequence specificity of deaminated CPDs matched the prominent mutation signature of melanomas. Our data identify the cytosine-deaminated CPD as the leading premutagenic lesion responsible for mutations in melanomas.

Jin, Seung-Gi; Pettinga, Dean; Johnson, Jennifer; Li, Peipei; Pfeifer, Gerd P.
The major mechanism of melanoma mutations is based on deamination of cytosine in pyrimidine dimers as determined by circle damage sequencing
Science Advances 7(31), 30 Jul 2021; eabi6508; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi6508

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Of course, being scientists who deal with reality, they have worked out the perfectly natural processes involved in this and saw no need to use supernatural explanations involving magic designers in the sky, malevolent or otherwise. It turned out to be a fully-understandable chemical process, initiated by UVB radiation, conforming entirely to the well-understood laws of chemistry and physics that Creationists reject as the explanation for genetic changes.

Which leaves Creationist to explain, as with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the global coronavirus pandemic, exactly why they prefer the view of their beloved god as an angry, malevolent evil, forever looking for better ways to make us sick and suffer, rather than accept that these things are the result of undirected natural forces in which neither magic nor design, whether intelligent, malevolent, or benign, play any part.

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