This example of what creationists believe must have been designed by their allegedly omnibenevolent god takes some beating for its sheer ghoulish nastiness. It is the toadfly, Lucilia bufonivora, or to be precise, the parasitic larvae of the toadfly.
This little piece of divine malevolence (if you believe the intelligent [sic] design hoax) would have made it into my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, had I been aware of it at the time. Maybe it will make it into a sequel one day.
This rather beautiful, metallic green fly, is a 'blow fly' of the Calliphoridae family, that are more familiar to most people as the blow flies such at the blue bottles and green bottles that lay eggs on dead animals and raw meat. It's the sort of thing in nature that creationists often point to and claim such an exquisite thing is evidence of design.
So what are the facts?
Unlike most blow flies, this charming little fly doesn't wait for its chosen larva food source to be dead first. It lays its eggs on the skin around the nostrils and eyes, and sometime in open wounds, of the living common toad, Bufo bufo, hence its scientific species name, bufonivora which literally means toad-eating. It also sometimes parasitised other amphibians, but strongly favour the common toad.
Poor #frog infected with nasal #parasite Lucilia #bufonivora How widespread is this #wildlifedisease ?#amphibians pic.twitter.com/9rxDV5mHug
— Andrew Breed (@Andrew_Breed) July 12, 2016
In a 1980 study in Holland, it was found that the flies tend to parasitise only the larger toads, leaving the young toads unmolested, presumably not from a feeling of sympathy for the little ones, but because they won't provide enough food for the larvae. 8% of toads were found to be infected and would have died, so the parasites are having a significant impact on the common toad population.
According to the creationist intelligent [sic] design notion, these flies and the reproductive modus operandum must be the work of an intelligent designer., because natural processes can’t account for it [sic].
Since it is unimaginable that a designer would design something without any idea what it is going to do, this reproductive MO would have been the purpose of these flies and the beautiful little flies are merely the means to deliver the eggs on the toads, since that is the result. The alternative is that the designer had no idea what would happen when it designed a fly to lay its eggs on living toads and its larvae to excrete digestive enzymes and eat the toad alive, which would be a strange use of the word 'intelligent' in reference to such a designer.
So, we, or rather creationists who have fallen for the ID hoax, are left with the inescapable conclusion that this nasty piece of work is the intentional design of their putative designer, for no other purpose than to increase the amount of suffering in the world and for a reason that has no discernible effect on humans, either as a benefit or a punishment for some imagined wrong at some point in a mythical human history. The alternative is that the 'designer' is a mindless, amoral, and uncaring, purposeless process with no plan and no idea what the outcome will be - much the way biologists say evolution by natural selection works, in fact.
I haven't heard of the Toadfly before. It's cruel, disgusting, and evil. What a disgusting, despicable, cruel way for an organism to satisfy its nourishment. It's a perverse form of nourishment.
ReplyDeleteThe Screw worm fly and its larvae are even worse as they will target warm blooded animals and humans to torture and kill. It's a vile, degenerate, demented demon who created these horrors. The creator is a cruel, insane, amoral, mentally blind, morally blind, heartless, pitiless, merciless, inhumane, stupid, vile monstrous maniac, criminal, cretin idiot worse than Hitler. It's beyond disgusting, and its beyond embarrassing.