Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Helping Cholera Win An Arms Race Against A Virus

How cholera bacteria outsmart viruses - EPFL

Time-course microscopy snapshots comparing cell morphology and cellular DNA content, as monitored using HU–mNeonGreen fusion (mNG), in WT and ΔWASA-1 backgrounds, following infection with ICP1-2006 at MOI 5.

Adams, D.W., Jaskólska, M., Lemopoulos, A. et al. (2025).

Biological arms races represent one of those problematic areas in biology that Intelligent Design (ID) creationists tend to avoid — precisely because they undermine the notion of a single, supreme intelligence orchestrating the design of all living organisms. These arms races typically occur in predator–prey or parasite–host relationships, where the survival of one party depends on improving its ability to evade, resist, or defend against the other — while the other evolves countermeasures to overcome those defences. From the standpoint of a single, omniscient designer, this results in a paradox: today’s ‘solution’ to a problem becomes tomorrow’s new problem to be solved. Where, exactly, is the intelligence in that?

A striking example of such an evolutionary arms race has just been uncovered by a team from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who found that a notorious strain of cholera possesses a suite of sophisticated immune systems to fend off viral attack. According to ID proponents like William A. Dembski, both this cholera strain and the viruses that infect it should qualify as products of ‘complex, specified information’. Likewise, under Michael J. Behe’s definition, both would be considered ‘irreducibly complex’. By their logic, this makes them the result of intelligent design by a supernatural creator.

In other words, creationism’s designer god has supposedly created viruses that infect the cholera bacterium—then equipped the bacterium with complex machinery to defend itself.

To make matters worse for creationists, this virus-resistant cholera strain was behind a devastating epidemic across Latin America. That is, the designer god not only enabled the bacterium to resist viruses, but in doing so gave it a better chance of surviving to infect and harm humans—using its ‘intelligently designed’, ‘irreducibly complex’ viral defences.

The research is published open access in Nature Microbiology.

Malevolent Designer News - How C. difficile is Designed to Kill Off Competition in Our Gut

C. diff uses toxic compound to fuel growth advantage VUMC News

Like all organisms, and particularly pathogenic parasites that colonise our intestines, Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) must compete with other organisms for nutrients. This competition inevitably fuels evolutionary arms races.

For devotees of creationism’s ‘intelligent designer’, C. diff might appear to be a cunning response to medical science's successful use of antibiotics against bacterial pathogens. This is because C. diff is equipped with multiple antibiotic-resistance genes, allowing it to thrive in hospital environments. It often infects patients who are already vulnerable due to other health conditions or compromised immunity, making it a significant medical challenge.

Furthermore, if one follows William A. Dembski's reasoning, the ‘complex specified information’ in C. diff’s genome, which grants it a competitive edge, must logically be attributed to an intelligent designer. Michael J. Behe’s attempt to absolve his version of an intelligent designer by blaming ‘sin’, ‘genetic entropy’, or alleged ‘devolution’ fails here. A mutation that clearly provides an adaptive advantage cannot logically be termed a ‘devolution’ from a supposedly more ‘perfect’ ancestral state.

If creationism’s intelligent designer intended to kick people when they were down, it could hardly have done better than designing C. diff.

How C. diff competes for resource in our gut by waging chemical warfare against the other gut biota is the subject of a paper in the journal Cell Host & Microbe by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Their findings are described in VUMC News:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Makes Its Host Destroy Its Own Brain

Beauveria bassiana on unidentified insect.

© Lisa Bennett (CC-BY 4.0)

Fungus ‘hacks’ natural immune system causing neurodegeneration in fruit flies - University of Birmingham

If we are to believe creationists, their god created insects such as fruit flies, Colorado beetles, etc., and then set about devising ways to kill them with, amongst other pathogens, fungi that infect them and destroy them from inside.

One of the problems this supposedly intelligent designer had to overcome was the immune system it had given the insects in order to protect them from the pathogens it was designing to kill them.

According to an open access paper just published in PLOS Biology by a team led by Professor Alicia Hidalgo from School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, one species of parasitic fungus, Beauveria bassiana, cleverly turns its host's immune system against its host, making it destroy its own brain. Although this fungus does not affect mammals, so poses no threat to humans, the team warns that it is possible that another fungus could use a similar technique against mammals, including humans.

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Betwen The Sexes!

Females position their legs to make their bodies look more attractive to a male

Male flies' better vision called the females' bluff | University of Gothenburg

When dance flies mate, females make themselves more attractive by swallowing air and laying their hairy legs along their bodies to look like they are full of eggs. New research shows that the males have developed better eyesight, probably to detect the deception.

As I showed in my books, The unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax and Unintelligently Designed Arms Races: How Nature Refutes Intelligent Design, the natural arms races that are ubiquitous in nature make no sense as the work of an intelligence. It is simply not an intelligent act to have an ultimately pointless arm race with yourself.

Arms races happen because one side doesn't know the other side's next move but falling behind could be ultimately fatal. Both sides have no option but to use the 'Red Queen strategy' of running ever faster just to stand still. It makes as much sense as playing poker with yourself. As the act of an intelligence, it would mean the designer sees the solution to yesterdays' problem as today's problem to be solved. It probably tells us a great more than they might wish us to know that creationists think this is a sign of supreme intelligence.
The latest such arms race to be revealed by science makes even less sense from an intelligent design perspective if that's possible. This one is an arms race between the sexes in an order of insects known as dance flies and is the result of the two different strategies the males and females use to ensure they get the best mate and so produce the fittest offspring.

Dance flies are (mostly) predatory flies that kill and eat other insects. To attracts a female, males perform a dance with other males in a flying display. The females attract a male by showing him her abdomen in full of eggs and she is ready to be inseminated. The male then pursues the female and presents her with a dead insect as food. She then allows him to mate with her. They will then go off and repeat the mating rituals so both will mate with multiple partners. The female then lays her fertilised eggs in damp soil where they hatch and live as larvae and pupa until ready to hatch and repeat the cycle.

It is in the females reproductive interest to attract the fittest males and she does this by flying in front of him to display a large body full of eggs, while the male concentrates his efforts of pursuing the female most likely to produce a large batch of eggs, and presenting her with a nutritious meal in return for mating with her.

Refuting Creationism - Oldest-Known Evolutionary Arms Race in the Cambrian

Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Oldest-Known Evolutionary “Arms Race” in the Cambrian | AMNH

Examples of Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia showing holes made by a perforating predator. Scale bars represent 200 micrometers.

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Perhaps Creationism's designer god is just a slow learner.

Anyone with an intellect greater than that of a plank should be capable of understanding the utter futility and waste in an arms race in which the strategy is to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. Arms races only make sense as the result of a game plan in which you can't communicate with your opponent and have no way of telling what he or she is thinking and if they gain the upper-hand, you lose. The only safe choice is to up the stakes - and that goes for your opponent too.

It becomes even more incomprehensible if the person you're having the arms race with is yourself, unless you're an amnesic with multiple personality disorder, and yet, if we believe creationists, that's exactly what their putative designer god is doing constantly.

Everywhere we look in nature, organisms are competing with one another for resources, or because one is trying to exploit the other as a food source in a predator-prey relationship or as a parasite trying to live in or on another organism and even killing it or making it weak and sickly as a byproduct of its parasitism. And yet creationists insist there is only one designer designing both sides in these arms races.

For some unfathomable reason, creationists like to imagine the idea of a celestial idiot having arms races with itself in millions of relationships in nature is a much better explanation than these arms races being the inevitable result of mindless evolutionary processes where a slight improvement increases the chances of leaving descendants while reducing the chance of the opponent doing the same, so creating a selection pressure for the next twist in the spiral.

Unintelligent Design - How Japanese Eels Are Designed To Escape From the Stomach Of Fish Designed To Eat Them

Juvenile Japanese Eel, Anguilla japonica

Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica

How Japanese eels escape from their predator's stomach | ScienceDaily

If creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer set out to show how stupid it can be, it would be hard pressed to come up with something as bizarre as designing a fish to eat eels, then designing eels to be able to escape from the stomach of the predators designed to eat them.

And yet creationists must believe that's exactly what their hyper-intelligent, omniscient god has done, according to the discovery of a team of researchers from the Graduate School of Fisheries and Environmental Sciences, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan.

According to their report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, juvenile Japanese eels, Anguilla japonica, can escape from the stomach of the predatory fish Odontobutis obscura by travelling back up the fish's oesophagus and out through a gill slit.

Evolution News - How Tiger Beetles Have Evolved an Unusual Form of Batsian Mimicry - Or Is This Unintelligent Design?

Tiger beetles are fierce predators, running quickly after smaller insects and crushing them with their large mandibles.

Photo: Geena Hill.

Tiger beetle, Lophyra sp.

Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work via Wikimedia (GFDL 1.2)

Tiger beetles fight off bat attacks with ultrasonic mimicry – Research News

The idea of predator-prey arms races is of course entirely inconsistent with the childish notion of intelligent design, because constantly designing solutions to problems you created earlier as solutions to even earlier problems you created, is not an act of intelligence.

And yet creationists continue to believe in intelligent [sic] design despite the abundance of these competitive arms races in the natural world.

It seems they have no difficulty in holding several pairs of mutually contradictory views of their putative designer god simultaneously. It is supremely intelligent and acts in ways that can only be described as supremely stupid.

It is omnibenevolent but designs ways to increase the suffering in the world with its parasites; it is omnipotent but powerless against another supernatural designer called 'sin'; and by the way, it is the only supernatural entity capable of designing living thing, so 'evidence' of design (i.e. something a creationist can't understand how it could have evolved) is proof of its existence.

Malevolent Design - Combatting The Highly Toxic, Tissue Destroying Spitting Cobra Venom

African black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

Warren Klein via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

© Marius Burger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

First effective treatment found for spitting cobra snakebite - Lancaster University

Snake venom is usually a potent cocktail of multiple different toxins, 'designed' to kill, mostly small vertebrate prey very quickly, so the snake can strike, then wait for the prey to become paralyzed or die before it can go very far.

The reason for this rich cocktail is an interesting piece of evolutionary biology that would embarrass any creationist with the courage to learn about it. It is the result of repeated arms races between the snake and its prey species. Not only that, but it involves new genetic information arising, by gene duplication and mutations - contrary to creationist dogma that such a thing is impossible.

As one prey species starts to evolve resistance there is selection pressure on the snake to change its venom to overcome the resistance or loose one source of food, but, there must be a balance between retaining one food species but loosing several others if the changed venom is less effective against them. Resistance usually arises when there is a change in receptor sites on cell surfaces, on which the venom acts so the active venom molecule doesn't bind to it.

Malevolent Design - Another Arms Race Between A Parasitic Worm And Its Host - Or is It Just Unintelligent Design?

Cane Toad, Rhinella marina

Cane Toad, Rhinella marina

A secret war between cane toads and parasitic lungworms is raging across Australia

The subject of parasitic arms races throws creationists into a bout of cognitive dissonance from which they can only emerge with a hefty dose of double-think and self-deception, telling themselves that it's perfectly logical to hold two diametrically opposite and mutually contradictory views simultaneously, like believing that the term 'circle' describes a spere but the term 'square doesn't describe a cube.

They need to believe that, whilst it is central to their dogma and the belief on which all their god of the gaps and false dichotomy fallacies relies - that there is only one creator god capable of whatever it is they are waving as 'proof' or its existence, and at the same time believing that parasites were created by a different creator, over whom their omnipotent god has no powers and who goes toe to toe with it in parasite-host arms races.

Sadly for creationists, they were denied the argument concerning a second creator by their guru and Deception Institute flunky, Michael J Behe, who used the evolution of parasites like Escherichia coli and Plasmodium falciparum (the malaria parasite) as 'proof that their god is the intelligent designer behind the 'design' of all living things.

So, let's do what Behe unwittingly did and remove the second, evil designer from the equation, and see where it leads.

A case in point is the recently discovered arms race between the Australian cane toads and the lung worm parasite that infests their lungs:

Unintelligent Design - Another Ludicrously Complex Arms Race, This Time Between Plants And A Predatory Fungus

Gray Mold, Botrytis cinerea, on green tomatoes

Discovery: plants use “trojan horse” to fight mold invasions | News

Running epigenetics a close second for the most obvious evidence of unintelligent design in nature is the ubiquitous arms race; Arms races are a major component of evolutionary biology, easily understandable in terms of evolution by natural selection. One organism (call it Organism A) predates on, or parasitises another (call it Organism B); this creates an advantage for Organism B in avoiding being eaten of serving as the host of Organism A, so any functional defense mechanism is selected for by natural selection. This in turn creates an advantage for Organism A to evolve a mechanism for overcoming Organism B's defences, and so on until a state of equilibrium is achieved in which either one or the other organism is no longer able to evolve further.

This can lead to some extreme adaptations such as the stupidly long neck and legs of the giraffe which is a response to acacia trees evolving longer trunks to place their leaves, flowers and seeds beyond the reach of giraffes. In the process, acacia trees need to produce masses of cellulose to build the trunk and pump water much higher against gravity than if they were low-growing bushes, and giraffes have to maintain a very high blood pressure to keep their brain supplied with oxygen while drinking water places them at risk of predation by lions because they can't stand up and raise their heads quickly or they will lose consciousness. And they need the additional complexity of special valves in their neck veins to maintain a high blood pressure to their brain.

Now, take away acacia trees (imagine a sudden virus that wipes them out) and the giraffe is no longer superbly adapted for its environment; instead, it is severely handicapped, and might even find feeding from an alternative source difficult.

Another arms race can be seen at the moment is where the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving new variants every few months in response to growing herd immunity in its hosts, the human population, due to vaccinations and sub-lethal infections. The virus is getting better at evading our antibodies for long enough for us to pass on the infection to someone else and is tending to be less lethal, so we survive to infect others, even being asymptomatic. Gradually the virus will evolve to become a relatively mild infection that most of us will catch as often as we catch the common cold, and only especially vulnerable people will be made seriously ill by it.

These are just two examples of hundreds of similar arms races in nature; there are even arms races between sexes of the same species as females evolve strategies to retain the ability to only mate with a male of her choice, while males evolve strategies to deprive her of that ability.

But how on Earth can this be explained in terms of design by a single designer, or, including the creationists fallback excuse for parasites, two designers - their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god and 'Sin'? Would not an omnipotent, omniscient god know in advance what Sin's next response would be and create a design that it couldn't overcome, so an arms race never started in the first place? Or are we to believe that creationism’s god and this 'Sin' thing are equal in all things yet able to conceal their next move from something all-knowing, but powerless to stop its rival? In other words, neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

The notion of intelligent design is quite simply incompatible with the evidence of arms races, for which evolution provides a ready answer.

I have devoted the whole of chapter 3 to arms races in nature in my popular, illustrated book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, but what it doesn't include is this recently discovered arms race between plants and a parasitic fungus, Botrytis cinerea, or gray mold.

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Intelligent [Sic] Designer Stupidly Competes With Itself In An Arms Race.

These microscope images show how interferon in the nucleus raises levels of the protective protein IFI16 (stained green) from low background levels (left) to the higher levels needed to resist herpes infection (right).

Image: HMS MicRoN core imaging facility/
Nicolas Romero Rata

Oral Herpes simplex

How the Immune System Fights to Keep Herpes at Bay | Harvard Medical School

Throughout the Cold War, starting soon after World War II and continuing through most of the second half of the 20th Century, the world's great powers, led by America on one side and Russia on the other, competed in a wasteful arms race where one side tried to outdo the other by building more powerful bombs and better delivery systems while also building better defences capable of preventing successful attack by the other. Money and resources that went into this ultimately pointless arms race could have been used for better, more peaceful projects like better world health care, better education or ending poverty and famine, yet neither side could afford to do the sensible thing because neither side trusted the other to abandon the race and compete with peace instead.

Although we can understand the pressures and insecurities that caused these wasteful arms races, we can also see the ultimate futility of it all and how the costs escalate with every turn of the spiral.

But how much more stupid would it have been if both 'sides' had the same people running them - if both America and Russia had the same political and military leaders? In other words, if the arms race was being run by one side alone, for no better reason than that the leaders had amnesia and didn't know why they built a bigger bomb or a better defence system yesterday and woke up today faced with a threat they had designed yesterday and needed to spend today designing ways to cope with these new threats?

One might be tempted to call into question the sanity of these leaders and wonder about their fitness to lead. What on Earth had allowed them to behave so stupidly? And for what reason? It certainly would have had nothing to do with the health and welfare or safety of the populations of Russia or America, or indeed the rest of the world, so could not be excused as some sort of well-intentioned altruism. An OCD or sheer malevolence, maybe, but not benevolence.

And yet creationists worship what they believe is a supernatural entity who behaves exactly like the amnesiac maniac I've just described. The natural world it reputedly designed, according to creationists, is full of example of these pointless and wasteful arms races for no ultimate long-term benefit to either 'side'.

Unintelligent Design - Why Skunks Have Evolved Different Colour Patterns

Four skunks, four different patterns

Striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis

November: Skunks' warning stripes | News and features | University of Bristol

It's better to warn than to attack because attacking is costly and carries risks, but a warning is often free or takes minimal effort.

This is why many creatures advertise the fact that they can be dangerous so leave them alone - yellow and black wasps; the warning rattle of a rattlesnake, the bright colours of a poison dart frog, or the black and white pattern of a skunk, for example.

But these patterns only work as a deterrent, if the potential threat has some experience or has evolved in their presence so has a genetic aversion.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Create Evolutionary Arms Races In a Laboratory

In laboratory flasks containing just two teaspoons of media, scientists document how rapid adaptation between bacteria and viruses produce complex ecological networks.

Credit: Josh Borin,
UC San Diego

A typical E. coli phage virus.

Bacteria-Virus Arms Race Provides Rare Window into Rapid and Complex Evolution

Creationists hate evolutionary arms races because they can't be sensibly explained in terms of intelligent design by a single omnipotent, omniscient designer and for a creationist, any other sort of designer(s) would be a serious blasphemy that would see them swiftly ejected from their cult and cast into outer darkness, socially speaking.

And yet evolutionary arms races are an integral part of evolution, probably accounting for more biodiversity than sex selection and environmental change. Evolutionary arms races are the inevitable result of the fact that living things eat other living things, either as parasite or as predators, so there are two ways an organism in a parasite-host or predator-prey relationship can gain an advantage over others of its species: it can either be a more successful parasite/predator or it can be better at avoiding being parasitised or eaten. Either scenario will lead to more offspring carrying the genes for greater success so they will increase in the species gene pool and the whole population will evolve in that direction, creating selection pressure on the other member of the relationship to respond appropriately.

This is all the result of natural selection at works, with no plan and no sentience needed.

It should not be beyond the wit of an average 10-year-old to comprehend that unless childhood brainwashing and theophobic psychosis has prevented rational thinking.

of course, in a natural setting, this all happens relatively slowly in small increments over time, so the evolutionary changes might not be observable for several generations.

So, a group of researchers from UC San Diego, Georgia Institute of Technology and Maryland University, have found a way to speed up the process in laboratory flasks by using small quantities of bacteria and the bacterial parasites, bacteriophage viruses, usually simply called phage viruses.

The news release from UC San Diego explains the research and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - New Thinking on How a Hunting Strategy Evolved in Barbastelle Bats - But no Comfort For Creationists.

Barbastelle, Barbastella barbastellus

Western barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus

Evolutionary chance made this bat a specialist hunter - SDU

In a classic example of how scientists never take what they think they know as proven beyond question, a group of scientists led by associate professor Lasse Jakobsen of the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark have reassessed how the Western barbastelle bat, Barbastella barbastellus, evolved its hunting strategy, and have concluded that the way we thought it evolved is probably wrong.

But it's no comfort to creationists because there is no suggestion that it may have been acquired by anything other than a god-free natural process or that the scientists are having any doubts about the Theory of Evolution. Indeed, the general principle of arms races is not in doubt, only whether it applies in the case of the barbastelle's hunting strategy. To add to creationist discomfort, evolutionary arms races were the subject of an early research paper by a certain Richard Dawkins together with John Richard Krebs and are now accepted as a fundamental driver of evolution. They are, of course, utterly incompatible with the notion of intelligent [sic] design.

Briefly, it was previously thought that the 'quiet' echolocation used by barbastelles to locate their insect prey was the result of an evolutionary arms race between bats and insects in which insects had evolved the ability to detect bats by their echolocation sounds and take evasive action. Bats then adjusted their sounds by either changing their frequencies or, in the case of barbastelles, turning down the volume.