Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Created Another Pandemic

Vibrio cholerae

Tracking down the origin of cholera pandemics | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Creationist mode:

The Coronavirus pandemic is not the only one the world is currently experiencing. It is not generally known in the developed world where clean drinking water has made it a rare disease, but we have been in the midst of a cholera pandemic since 1961 - the seventh in a series of cholera pandemics known to science.

The organism that causes it is a nasty little bacterium known as Vibrio cholerae. It kills around 95,000 people a year and makes another 2.3 million people sick.

Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, and the Institute for Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, City College New York, USA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA, have shown how small tweaks to the bacterial genome may have played a role in the emergence of the seventh pandemic.

The strain causing the current pandemic, known as the El Tor biotype, has a molecular mechanism to help them kill rival bacteria known as the "Type VI secretion system" (T6SS) with which it can inject toxins into rival cells. This was lacking in earlier versions of V. cholerae, so the newer type was able to predominate in the competition for resources.

As any Creationists will tell you, molecular systems such as the T6SS must be designed by an intelligent [sic] designer, so none of that would have happened had not their beloved pestilential, genocidal god not intended it to. This is the same designer who designed the flagellum which enables V. cholerae to be more effective at killing us.

Creationist mode:

However, because they understand the science, the scientists attribute these changes to a mindless natural process called evolution. In the Max Planck Gesellschaft news article explains:

With these findings, we support the theory that microbial competition between bacteria is very important for understanding pathogens and bacterial pandemics. Our research on the cholera bacterium was made possible by an S2 laboratory newly established at the institute. Here, we can conduct experiments with bacterial pathogens under the necessary safety precautions. The study contains some of the first data from the new laboratory.

Daniel Unterweger, co-author
Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
And the Institute for Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany

In their natural environment, bacteria are subject to competition with other bacteria for space and nutrients. In this process, molecular mechanisms help them to hold their own. One such mechanism is the so-called "type 6 secretion system" (T6SS), with which a bacterium transports toxic proteins into a neighboring bacterium and thereby kills it. Thus, cholera bacteria of the seventh pandemic use their T6SS to keep other bacteria in check and presumably more easily cause infection.

Researchers now had the special opportunity to study the T6SS of cholera bacteria from previous pandemics. For this purpose, among other things, the T6SS genome sequence of cholera bacteria from the 2nd pandemic was reconstructed from a museum specimen from the 19th century in a complex procedure and recreated in the laboratory.

In the process, the scientists were able to show that 2nd and 6th pandemic cholera bacteria lack a functional T6SS. As a result, the bacteria of earlier pandemics not only lack the ability to attack other bacteria, they are themselves killed by bacterial strains of the seventh pandemic. This may have been one of the reasons that older cholera strains were displaced by modified cholera strains of the seventh pandemic and are now hard to find.

A Maximum likelihood tree based on core-genome SNP sites of indicated V. cholerae strains. Insertions, deletions and nucleotide substitutions are noted. Classical strains with the same mutations in the large cluster of the T6SS and TsiV1 are highlighted in the same colour. The horizontal bars indicate the mean. B Schematic representation of the sequential acquisition of T6SS mutations among representative classical V. cholerae strains. Arrows highlight the specific changes to the T6SS gene cluster.

Kostiuk, Benjamin; Santoriello, Francis J.; Diaz-Satizabal, Laura; et al (2022)

The team's findings are published, open access, in Nature Communications:

Abstract

The gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae is the causative agent of the diarrhoeal disease cholera and is responsible for seven recorded pandemics. Several factors are postulated to have led to the decline of 6th pandemic classical strains and the rise of El Tor biotype V. cholerae, establishing the current 7th pandemic. We investigated the ability of classical V. cholerae of the 2nd and 6th pandemics to engage their type six secretion system (T6SS) in microbial competition against non-pandemic and 7th pandemic strains. We report that classical V. cholerae underwent sequential mutations in T6SS genetic determinants that initially exposed 2nd pandemic strains to microbial attack by non-pandemic strains and subsequently caused 6th pandemic strains to become vulnerable to El Tor biotype V. cholerae intraspecific competition. The chronology of these T6SS-debilitating mutations agrees with the decline of 6th pandemic classical strains and the emergence of 7th pandemic El Tor V. cholerae.

Kostiuk, Benjamin; Santoriello, Francis J.; Diaz-Satizabal, Laura; Bisaro, Fabiana; Lee, Kyung-Jo; Dhody, Anna N.; Provenzano, Daniele; Unterweger, Daniel; Pukatzki, Stefan
Type VI secretion system mutations reduced competitive fitness of classical Vibrio cholerae biotype
Nature Communications 12, 6457 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26847-y

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Clearly, devotees of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer have some explaining to do now. Their problem is that systems like the T6SS the El Tor biotype of V. cholerae is equipped with are normally waved around as evidence of irreducible complexity, so they are denied the claim that somehow 'sin' creates these mechanisms, not their magic god, who is powerless to prevent it, apparently. But then, since it was pointed out when Michael J Behe started to claim the bacterial flagellum must have been intelligently designed because it is supposedly irreducibly complex', that it had been known for some time that the flagellum was almost certainly the result of evolutionary exaptation of a redundant (or duplicated) similar secretion system (the Type II Secretion System) in an early bacterium, they tend to steer well clear of discussing these systems.

But, however they want to play it, they have to explain why an entity with the powers and abilities to create and then 'improve' things like V. cholerae, should be regarded as one and thr same as the supposedly all-loving god of the Bible and Qur'an, and why it should not be regarded as an evil god who likes nothing more than watching its creation suffer, if such a malevolence actually existed, that is.

Somehow, I'm beginning to doubt that any Creationist with enough courage and personal integrity, and sufficient understanding of this glaring inconsistency in their cult's dogma, is ever going to come forward to explain the curious paradox of a supposedly omni-benevolent god who wants to minimise suffering in the world being one and the same as the designer of these nasty little organisms and why they prefer us to have that view of their beloved sadist rather than accept that they are wrong about evolution.

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