Malevolent Designer News
It Didn't Take Creationism's Divine Malevolence Long to Design Parasites
It Didn't Take Creationism's Divine Malevolence Long to Design Parasites
Reconstruction shows the dense aggregations of monotypic Neobolus wulongqingensis forming benthic ‘meadows’ on the soft sediment with their associated obligate encrusting kleptoparasitic tube-dwelling organisms.
As we can see from the very many parasites that exist in nature, Creationism's putative designer likes nothing more than to create organisms that harm other organisms - if you subscribe to the intelligent [sic] design hoax, that is.
The existence of parasites refute any notion that the designer god is also the supposedly all-loving god of the Christian Bible because, if anything fits the adjective 'evil' it's parasites that cause sickness, disability and death or otherwise take from their host, giving nothing in return.
Now, according to a 2020 paper in Nature, it seems that parasitism has been around for almost as long as multicellular life, and in all probability, well before that. The evidence is in the form of fossil brachiopods encrusted with kleptoparasitic tube worms. These worms are aligned to match the feeding currents of the brachiopods, making it clear that they took a share of the food in the water currents the sedentary brachiopods generated to bring them food.
The authors, a team of palaeontologists from the Northwest University, Xi’an, China, point out that there are no convincing examples of parasite-host relationships in the Ediacaran biota, so these parasites appear to have arisen early in the Cambrian and so would have played an important role in the Cambrian radiation.
By comparing the size of tube-free brachiopods with the size of those encrusted with them, the authors were able to show that encrustation was associated with a lower growth rate, so the relationship was almost certainly parasitic and not symbiotic or commensal.
Fig. 1: The brachiopod Neobolus wulongqingensis sp. nov., with associated obligate, encrusting kleptoparasitic tubes.
a ELI GB-N-0301, densely aggregated valves of N. wulongqingensis forming distinctive shell beds with their associated kleptoparasites. Scale bar 4 mm. b, c Specimens of N. wulongqingensis with varying numbers of encrusting kleptoparastic tubes (see Supplementary Note 1 for details); b ELI GB-N-0650, c ELI GB-N-0648-5. d ELI GB-N-0008, N. wulongqingensis with baculate mantle canals preserved. e ELI GB-N-0261-18, N. wulongqingensis with encrusting kleptoparastic tubes. f ELI GB-N-0255-6, internal view of a pair of conjoined valves with kleptoparasitic tubes encrusted to both valves g ELI GB-N-0869-2-1. N. wulongqingensis with encrusting kleptoparasitic tubes and trilobite cranidium (exuviae) lacking attached tubes. Scale bars 2 mm, unless otherwise stated.
Source: Zhang, Z., et al.(2020)"
Parasitism inevitably results in evolutionary arms races so is a major driver of evolution, as the hosts adopt strategies to avoid or reduce depredation by parasites and the parasites adopt strategies to overcome the hosts' defences.
As the result of unplanned evolution, that makes perfect sense, but what it doesn't make any sense of is the notion of intelligent [sic] design in which a single entity appears to be in a mindless competition with itself, treating the solutions it designed to protect its creation from the parasites it designed to harm them, as problems requiring a solution.
And it seems that the Creationist frauds who run the cults are acutely aware of the problem parasites present to them, so they have to abandon the pretence that intelligent [sic] design is real science and invoke religious superstition to explain it. Take this hilarious response to this paper by Tim Clary of one of the leading Creationist disinformation sites, the misleadingly named Institute for Creation Research (ICR), which carries out no research whatsoever and requires its contributors to swear an annual oath that their conclusions will always be in full accord with a literal interpretation of the Bible. No self-respecting scientist who values their academic reputation would ever agree their conclusions before they begin their research as a condition for getting it published:
There is a better explanation for these brachiopods and their apparent parasites. In a biblical worldview, some organisms acquired a parasitic lifestyle after the Fall and affected many animals. These brachiopods and parasites were simply buried in some of the first rock layers deposited by the global Flood, part of the lowermost Cambrian System. They were not the first or the last of their kind, just the first ones buried.Clary offers not one iota of evidence for his assertions, of course, because there is none, and he seems oblivious that he has blundered into giving away the fact that Creationism is not science but Bible literalist superstition. So he stupidly refutes years of arduous work on the part of the Discovery Institute to fool legislators into thinking that Creationism is genuine science, not fundamentalist religion dressed in a lab coat, and so children should be indoctrinated with it at public expense in science class.
And, of course, Clary offers nothing by way of explanation for how something a mythical founder couple were supposed to have done, can make one species become parasitic on another. What precisely is the biological mechanism behind that change of lifestyle? If there is another creator at work, where does that leave the Biblical god as the omnipotent sole creator of all life on Earth? It appears to be incapable of outwitting this alternative creator, and is reduced to merely competing with it in a never-ending arms race for no discernible ultimate purpose, leading to ludicrously complex organisms that are far from intelligently designed.
Nor has Clary any sense of time, blaming something that happened in the Cambrian, some 500 million years ago, on something Christian mythology claims happened some 10,000 years ago. His idiotic attempt to explain this away with the assertion that these brachiopods are at the bottom of the geological column because they were the first to be buried, would apply to other bottom-dwelling species from much later in geological time, of course, yet that's not what we see. Instead, we see a steady progression through the geological column with bottom-dwelling and burrowing species much higher up than these brachiopods. How does Clary explain this? He doesn't. He depends on his target marks being all too willing to swallow his pap and not to ask too many questions. After all, he has 'PhD after his name so he must be a scientist.
The team's open access paper is published in Nature:
Abstract
Parasite–host systems are pervasive in nature but are extremely difficult to convincingly identify in the fossil record. Here we report quantitative evidence of parasitism in the form of a unique, enduring life association between tube-dwelling organisms encrusted to densely clustered shells of a monospecific organophosphatic brachiopod assemblage from the lower Cambrian (Stage 4) of South China. Brachiopods with encrusting tubes have decreased biomass (indicating reduced fitness) compared to individuals without tubes. The encrusting tubes orient tightly in vectors matching the laminar feeding currents of the host, suggesting kleptoparasitism. With no convincing parasite–host interactions known from the Ediacaran, this widespread sessile association reveals intimate parasite–host animal systems arose in early Cambrian benthic communities and their emergence may have played a key role in driving the evolutionary and ecological innovations associated with the Cambrian radiation.
Zhang, Z., Strotz, L.C., Topper, T.P. et al.
An encrusting kleptoparasite-host interaction from the early Cambrian.
Nat Commun 11, 2625 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16332-3
Copyright: © 2020 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
For reasons I have mentioned above, parasitism is a continuing thorn in Creationism's flesh because it is utterly incompatible both with any notion of intelligent design and with any notion of design by an omni-benevolent god. It can only be explained away by invoking religious fundamentalism and Bible literalism in the form of 'The Fall', which presupposes that the Hebrew origin myth in the Bible of a founding couple, is literal, historical and biological truth. The tale includes making a man from mud and a woman from his rib, magic fruit and a talking serpent, and the consequent need to appease an irascible, supposedly omniscient, invisible, mind-reading god who lives above the sky and didn't know what its creation would do and can’t forgive them for doing it.
And this is considered to be a more accurate account of reality than anything science can ever discover.
Creationist frauds love the Cambrian because they can easily fool their dupes into believing that the 'Cambrian Explosion' was a sudden creation of lots of different body plans without predecessors or any evidence of evolution. It wasn't of course and took 50 million or more years to produce the biota found in the Burgess Shales. It is deliciously ironic therefore that the subject that Creationists hate to discuss most - parasitism - may have been a major contributory cause of that rapid, evolutionary radiation.
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