Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes
Imagine for a moment that you are an intelligent designer, and your task is to provide a squid with bioluminescence - something you've done hundreds, even thousands of times in other species by giving them special enzymes and substances called phosphors. What would you do?
Well, if you’ve got any sense, you would adapt one of the hundreds of tried and tested processes you used in other species, wouldn't you? That would be the intelligent thing to do and would mean minimal complexity and maximal simplicity - two of the hall marks of good design (actually two sides of the same coin since you can't have one without the other).
But not if you're Yahweh, the creator god of the Creationist cults - the one they call an intelligent designer - a misnomer, as we shall see.
If you're Yahweh you choose a bioluminescent bacterium to insert into the squid, then you design a ludicrously complicated way to get the bacterium to the right place inside the squid's body while making sure that harmful bacteria don't also get in the same way. And of course, because the bacteria need nutrients without harming the squid, you need to design special chambers called crypts for them to live in and set up a process to supply them with nutrients in their crypts.
As this article by Catherine Offord in The Scientist explains:
The journey into a squid isn’t an easy one. But the bioluminescent marine microbe Vibrio fischeri is up for the challenge. Usually a free-living bacterium, V. fischeri has evolved a part-time symbiotic relationship with the Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes). The latter stands to gain from the microbe’s bioluminescence to disguise its silhouette against a moonlit backdrop from predators lurking below. V. fischeri, meanwhile, can benefit from a safe place to feed, grow, and divide—something the squid offers in the tiny nutrient-filled crypts of a specialized structure called the light organ.Obviously, being Yahweh, you consider this to be a much more intelligent solution than simply creating bioluminescence in the squid cells where it is needed, using the same process as you used when you designed the bioluminescent bacteria. Or at least if you're a member of the Creationist cult that credits Yahweh with everything, you regard that as an intelligently designed solution because believing in magic like a toddler, you think that's a simpler and more plausible explanation than one which involved co-evolution between the squid and the bacteria, probably progressing in small stages from a parasitic relationship with the bacteria predating on the squid to a symbiotic one in which the bacterium provides something in return and as a result is not attacked by the squid's defences - which incidentally, Creationists believe Yahweh designed then needed to modify to allow V. fischeri through.
For the bacteria, getting to these crypts is a multistep affair, and fraught with peril, explains Spencer Nyholm, a biologist at the University of Connecticut and an expert on symbioses. To find its future host, V. fischeri has to swim up a trail of “mucus goo” secreted by baby squid upon leaving their eggs, while avoiding being killed by the goo’s abundant antimicrobial compounds. If it reaches the animal’s surface, the microbe next faces what’s known as the gauntlet. “There’s this little ciliated pore that’s like the door to the light organ, and there’s six of these doors on each squid—three on each side,” Nyholm explains. Each bacterium must navigate through one of the pores, dodging the beating cilia, and then swim along a duct pumped full of toxic compounds known as reactive oxygen species. Survivors pass through an antechamber and then have to squeeze through a microscopic bottleneck guarding the crypts themselves, Nyholm says. Only a handful of bacterial cells ever make it.
But as though that wasn't complex enough, being Yahweh, you then set up arms races between different strains of V. fischeri even though the squid apears to be indifferent to which strain does the job. According to research by Clotilde Bongrand of the University of Florida, and Edward Ruby of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the arms race involves whichever strain gets to the squid's crypt first setting up a mechanism for keeping other strains out and all for no discernible purpose.
To an adult biologist of course, this is just another example of the needless complexity that the process of evolution ends up with because it is unplanned, utilitarian, and unintelligent, and, as a process which can only build on what is available to it, can't go into reverse, or scrap a bad design and start again. As an example of bad design in its needless complexity, is as good an example as you could wish for of something that couldn't possibly be ascribed to an intelligent designer; one of many such examples which refutes the childish notion of intelligent design playing any part in biodiversity.
Hat-tip to Bil Wight on Facebook for bringing this example to my attention.
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