Novel Maneuver Helps Malaria Parasite Dodge the Immune System | Newsroom | Weill Cornell Medicine
Here’s one of those discoveries in biological science that should have ID creationists jumping up and down yelling, "Told you so!". It’s news that the parasite that causes malaria shows both what they call 'irreducible complexity' and 'complex specified genetic information'. According to Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski, that would mean it is intelligently designed and, by implication, designed to do exactly what it does — by the Christian God.
But, for reasons which can only be guessed at — and probably not a million miles from the fact that this conclusion would mean the Christian god is actively designing ways to kill people, particularly children, and especially in Africa — creationists tend to ignore it. After all, that’s the very antithesis of the compassionate, benevolent, loving god of the Bible.
Instead, they quietly sidestep the inconvenient reality that examples of their supposed 'proof of intelligent design' are found just as often in parasites and pathogens as in their hosts. This is precisely what evolutionary biology predicts: a host–parasite relationship invariably leads to an evolutionary arms race, producing sophisticated and complex systems that equip the parasite to survive in the host and to infect new victims.
And, true to form, we now have another such example in the major cause of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, which killed some 569,000 people in Africa in 2023:
Key Facts:
- Globally in 2023, there were an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 malaria deaths in 83 countries.
- The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden.
- In 2023, the WHO African Region was home to 94% of malaria cases (246 million) and 95% (569,000) of malaria deaths (432,400 children under 5).
- Children under 5 accounted for about 76% of all malaria deaths in the Region.