Malevolent Designer News - How The Malaria Parasite Is Cleverly Designed to Maximise Suferring

Immune response to
Plasmodium falciparum infection

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Plasmodium falciparum parasite.

Malaria’s mRNA: Messages that Mess with the Immune System | Weizmann USA

Research is continually revealing just how efficient the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is at making people sick — and, all too often, killing them. There can be few better examples of the sort of intricate, information-rich biological machinery that Discovery Institute Fellows such as Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski insist points to an intelligent designer. Although they are careful never to say so plainly, their dog-whistle signals leave their followers in little doubt that this putative designer is meant to be the god of the Bible and Qur’an. That ambiguity gives them enough wriggle-room to tell courts and educators that Intelligent Design is science, not creationism in a lab coat, while still presenting it to supporters as a moral crusade against “Darwinism”.

Now researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in a paper published recently in Cell Reports, have shown yet another reason why this parasite is so successful. Malaria caused an estimated 610,000 deaths in 2024; the WHO African Region accounted for about 95% of those deaths, and children under five made up about three-quarters of the deaths in that region, according to the World Health Organization.

The researchers, led by Professor Neta Regev-Rudzki, discovered that the parasite exports tiny vesicles containing messenger RNA (mRNA), not only into the red blood cells it infects, but also into the host’s monocytes — immune-system cells that should be helping to fight the infection. Once inside the monocyte, the parasite’s mRNA enters the cell nucleus and binds to two essential human proteins, ACIN1 and PNN, which are normally involved in cutting and splicing RNA transcripts so they can be translated into proteins. With this splicing machinery disrupted, crucial immune-related transcripts are misprocessed and degraded, suppressing the production of proteins needed for an effective immune response.

In other words, P. falciparum is not merely hiding from the immune system; it is actively sabotaging part of the host’s cellular communication network from inside the nucleus. The result is a neat evolutionary trick: the immune system is distracted and disrupted while the real threat — parasites multiplying inside red blood cells — continues to spread.

Evolution In Progress - How Honey Bees Are Evolving - Another Move In The Arms Race

Southern California hybrid honeybee hive hanging from a tree in the wild.

Boris Baer/UCR

Varroa destructor on a honeybee

Jon Gascoyne/Flickr

SoCal honeybees can fend off deadly mites | UCR News | UC Riverside

A new paper in Scientific Reports by Genesis Chong-Echavez and Boris Baer of the University of California, Riverside, casually refutes creationism by showing evolution in progress. It describes how honeybees, Apis mellifera, are evolving to survive in the presence of a serious parasite, the Varroa mite, Varroa destructor. And, no doubt to the consternation of any creationists who understand the implications, it also illustrates how evolutionary arms races are a major driver of adaptation. Both parasites and arms races are deeply embarrassing for creationism because they make little sense as the products of an intelligent designer. Indeed, parasites conform to the Discovery Institute’s supposed “proof” of intelligent design only if that designer is malevolent; yet if parasites are dismissed as evidence of design, creationists are simply abandoning one of their own favourite arguments.

In other words, a parasite-host arms race is a paradox that creationism cannot resolve, whereas evolutionary theory not only explains it, but is strengthened by it. The paper concerns a Southern Californian hybrid population of honeybees with ancestry from Western European, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and African lineages. These bees are showing resistance to the Varroa mite, a parasite that has played a major role in the catastrophic losses of managed honeybee colonies in the United States, where beekeepers reported losses of up to 62% in 2025.

The researchers monitored 236 colonies over four years and found that the Californian hybrid colonies consistently had lower mite infestation rates than colonies headed by commercial queens. In the UCR summary of the work, the hybrid colonies are described as having about 68% fewer mites on average and as being more than five times less likely to cross the treatment threshold at which chemical control becomes necessary. Laboratory experiments also showed that the mites were less attracted to larvae from these hybrid bees, especially at the stage when mites would normally be most likely to invade brood cells.

The usual creationist response to examples like this is to retreat into a parody definition of evolution involving a change in “kind”, with “kind” carefully left undefined, or to fall back on Bible-literalist theology and explain parasites as the result of “sin”, by some unexplained mechanism against which their creator appears curiously powerless. But the problem of arms races remains. On that view, creationism’s single designer seems to be competing with itself, continually redesigning solutions to problems of its own making, ad infinitum. Evolutionary biology, by contrast, has no such difficulty. It predicts exactly this kind of reciprocal adaptation between parasite and host.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence For Earliest Large Land Predators - 280 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study finds earliest evidence of big land predators hunting plant-eaters | EurekAlert

Contradicting creationist claims that death entered the world when Eve's sin somehow transformed a previously perfect world into a fallen one—with the creator god apparently powerless to prevent some other magical entity interfering in its creation—we now have evidence of predation; that is, the killing and eating of one living organism by another. Needless to say, like 99.975% of the history of life on Earth, this all occurred 280 million years ago, during that long pre-“Creation Week” period before the creationist god supposedly decided to create his small flat planet with a dome over it and call it perfect.

The nonsensical idea that there were no deaths before “The Fall” has always defied logic because all living things require a supply of energy in the form of food. Even if that food is plants, plants must die in the process. But then the Bible’s mythologies were written by people who confused “living” with “breathing”, so assumed plants were not living. Presumably, Bible literalists today believe the same biologically nonsensical idea.

The evidence for the earliest large land predators comes from three palaeontologists led by Professor Robert R. Reisz of the Department of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, who have just published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports. The group studied tooth marks on the fossilised skeletons of three young herbivores from the Permian of Texas. Two hundred and eighty million years ago was relatively soon after the first terrestrial tetrapods had crawled out of the sea and evolved into amphibians and the earliest proto-reptiles. The evolution of predation would have been a major driver of evolution due to the resulting arms races in which predators became more efficient hunters and prey became better at avoiding being eaten—a process that hardly fits the description “intelligent design”.

Refuting Creationism - A Small Problem for Science - A Massive Blow For Creationists

Scarisoara Ice Cave in Romania.

Credit: Paun V.I.

Bacteria frozen in ancient underground ice cave found to be resistant against 10 modern antibiotics

As every schoolboy knows, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic when the fungus Penicillium contaminated a Petri dish in which he had been culturing bacteria. What Fleming had discovered was a naturally occurring antibacterial substance produced by the fungus.

Such compounds are produced by fungi as part of their evolutionary arms race with the bacteria in their environment, and there is a whole range of them, many still awaiting discovery. On the other side of this arms race, bacteria evolve resistance.

It is a struggle that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, ever since fungi evolved — and perhaps even earlier between ancestral eukaryotes and bacteria. Modern medical use of antibiotics has simply accelerated this ancient contest. We are now facing a major challenge in keeping pace with bacterial evolution, and hospitals in particular have become breeding grounds for resistant strains.

The tendency, therefore, is to assume that antibiotic resistance is a modern, anthropogenic phenomenon. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that a bacterium, Psychrobacter SC65A.3, recovered from 5,000-year-old ice cores in a Romanian cave, has been found to be resistant to ten modern antibiotics.

Frankly, this is difficult to explain other than in terms of earlier evolutionary arms races. The discovery, by a team from the Institute of Biology, Bucharest, Romania, with colleagues from the University of Bucharest and the Universidad de Antofagasta, Chile, is reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

While this finding presents microbiologists with an intriguing puzzle, it presents creationists with a more acute problem. There simply should not be 5,000-year-old ice preserved in a Romanian cave — let alone viable bacteria within it — if the biblical narrative of a global flood some 4,000 years ago were historically accurate. And if a putative designer deity created bacteria already equipped with resistance to antibiotics that would not be synthesised by humans for millennia, that would imply pre-emptive malevolence.

This leaves modern Intelligent Design advocates with an uncomfortable choice: retreat into literalist theology and abandon scientific reasoning, or confront the implications of the evidence.

Refuting Creationism - An Evolutionary Arms Race In Space - No Intelligence Involved

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

In this illustration, a phage — a type of virus that infects bacteria — rests on the surface of a host cell. Researchers at UW–Madison designed an experiment for the International Space Station to study how phage-bacteria interactions affect the health of the gut microbiome.

Microbes mutated in space hint at biomedical benefits to humans on Earth – UW–Madison News

In a striking demonstration of the theory of evolution in practice — and something that will have creationists once again insisting on redefining evolution as a theory about one creature turning into an entirely unrelated taxon — an experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown how subtle changes in the environment can dramatically alter an evolutionary trajectory. It also illustrates another major embarrassment for Intelligent Design creationists: evolutionary arms races. Arms races are, of course, utterly incompatible with the idea of an intelligent designer, since running to stand still in a race with yourself is a neat definition of insanity.

Unlike the creationist parody of evolution — carefully engineered to be unprovable because it does not describe what actually happens and what no biologist has ever claimed — the real scientific definition of evolution is simply a change in the frequency of different alleles in a population over time. A definition that creationists know to be irrefutable, hence their persistent attempts to redefine it so that they have something to attack.

The experiment, which had a parallel control on Earth, was designed to observe how bacteriophage viruses that parasitise bacteria and their hosts co-evolved in the microgravity environment of space.

The results have just been published in PLOS Biology. They show that both the T7 phage virus and the E. coli bacteria developed marked genomic differences compared with the Earth-bound populations. The space-station phages gradually accumulated specific mutations that enhanced infectivity or improved their ability to bind receptors on bacterial cells. Meanwhile, the space-station E. coli accumulated mutations that improved resistance to phages and enhanced survival in near-weightless conditions. In other words, what was observed was a genuine evolutionary arms race — and because the environments differed between the space-station populations and the Earth-bound populations, the divergence can be attributed directly to differences in gravity.

The results highlighted another intriguing angle: the mutations that phages and bacteria acquire in space don’t just reveal fundamental evolutionary dynamics, they can also have practical applications for human health on Earth. After 25 days aboard the ISS, both organisms returned with novel mutations not commonly seen under terrestrial gravity, including changes to bacterial surface proteins and corresponding phage adaptations to bind those altered surfaces.

Researchers then engineered phages carrying these space-derived mutations and tested them against bacterial pathogens responsible for urinary tract infections — many of which are now resistant to antibiotics — finding the space-influenced phages were notably effective at killing these otherwise resistant strains. This suggests that the unique selection pressures of microgravity may reveal evolutionary pathways that could be harnessed to design improved therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections back on Earth.

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Race Between a Parasitic Beetle And a Parasitic Fungus

Creationism's Unintelligent Designer Trying To Solve The Problem He Just Created

Adult spruce bark beetles in their galleries in the bark of a Norway spruce tree. The beetle in the middle is infected with the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

© Benjamin Weiss, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Fungus turns bark beetles’ defenses against them

A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) has raised the spectre of evolutionary arms races for creationism. Evolutionary arms races are something of a nightmare for creationists because, within the paradigm of intelligent design by a single designer, having an arms race with yourself makes no sense at all.

Evolutionary arms races are among the strongest arguments against intelligent design, as I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax. They epitomise stupidity. What on Earth is the point of designing a solution to a problem for one species, only to treat that solution as a problem to be solved for another? It is almost exactly as if two organisms are evolving in response to changes in their environments, of which their predator or prey is a key component. It makes less sense than a dog chasing its own tail – at least the dog gets some exercise.

The arms race reported in this paper, by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, is between the spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, and the pathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana.

In fact, there are two arms races at work here. The first is between the Norway spruce, Picea abies, and its microbial environment. The tree produces antimicrobial phenolic compounds as a defence. The spruce bark beetle has evolved the ability to convert these compounds into an even more toxic derivative, which helps protect the beetle and enables it to successfully colonise the spruce.

The clever twist is that the fungus Beauveria bassiana has evolved a countermeasure. It converts the beetle’s toxic compound by binding a sugar molecule to it and adding a methyl group. This modification effectively neutralises the beetle’s antifungal defence, making it more susceptible to fungal infection.

Translated into creationist terms, a designer first designed a defence for the spruce that can be exploited by a parasitic beetle to protect itself from microbes, including a pathogenic fungus. The same designer then designed a pathogenic fungus capable of neutralising the beetle’s defences, allowing it to infect the beetle more efficiently.

Creationism Refuted - A Massive Evolutionary Arms Race 130 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life in the Paja ecosystem

AI-generate image (ChatGPT5.2)

Illustration of some of the apex predators in the Paja Formation biota with a human for scale.

Image by Artwork by Guillermo Torres, Hace Tiempo, Instituto von Humboldt.

Apex predators in prehistoric Colombian oceans would have snacked on killer whales today: McGill study | Newsroom - McGill University

Two researchers at McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, have uncovered evidence of an ecosystem teeming with giant marine predators some 130 million years ago. The largest of these predators could, quite literally, have eaten something the size of a modern orca as little more than a snack. This will make depressing reading for creationists, not only because it all happened deep in the long pre-“Creation Week” history of life on Earth, but because the evolutionary arms races that led to these giants are precisely what the theory of evolution by natural selection predicts.

The two researchers, Dirley Cortés and Professor Hans C. E. Larsson, have just published their findings, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

It doesn’t get any easier for creationists. Just because it’s Christmas week doesn’t mean the awkward facts are going to go away, or that scientists are going to stop uncovering more of them. No matter what they post on social media; no matter how loudly they shout; or how fervently they gather on Sundays to collectively drown out their doubts, Santa is not going to deliver evidence that the Bronze Age creation myths in the Bible contain even a grain of historical truth. The problem is that truth remains true whether a creationist believes it or not, and regardless of whether their parents believed it. No amount of looking the other way or pretending the facts aren’t there will ever change that.

The palaeontologists reached their conclusions by reconstructing an ecosystem network for all known animal fossils from the Paja Formation in central Colombia. They used body sizes, feeding adaptations, and comparisons with modern animals, and then validated the results against one of the most detailed present-day marine ecosystem networks available: the living Caribbean ecosystem, which they used as a reference. The Paja ecosystem thrived with plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and abundant invertebrates, giving rise to one of the most intricate marine food webs known. This complexity emerged as sea levels rose and Earth’s climate warmed during the Mesozoic era, including the Cretaceous, triggering an explosion of marine biodiversity.

Malevolent Design - A Paradox Creationists Pretend Not to See

The ancient city of Jerash, Jordan, epicentre of the Justinian Plague

Progress of the Black Death in Europe

By Flappiefh - Own work from:Natural Earth  Cesana, D.; Benedictow O.J., Bianucci R. (2017). "The origin and early spread of the Black Death in Italy: first evidence of plague victims from 14th-century Liguria (northern Italy)". Anthropological Science 125 (1): 15–24. DOI:10.1537/ase.161011. ISSN: 0918-7960. (page 17),
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

USF, FAU researchers solve 1,500-year-old mystery: The bacterium behind the first pandemic

The notion of intelligent design — the current flagship of creationism’s attempt to replace scientific realism with magical superstitions and Bible literalism dressed up as “alternative science” — contains a blatant paradox its advocates must ignore: the very same “logic” used to argue that the God of the Bible created living organisms can just as easily be used to argue that any such designer is a malevolent sadist who deliberately increases suffering in the world while ignoring countless ways to reduce it.

The theological problems this raises are never discussed in polite creationist circles, except for the lazy fallback of blaming everything on “The Fall.” But this move exposes intelligent design for what it really is — Bible-literalist religion in disguise. And that sits awkwardly against over half a century of insistence by the Discovery Institute that ID is not a religious idea, but rather a scientific one that should be taught in American public schools at taxpayer expense — a direct violation of the Establishment Clause and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).

The paradox lies in the fact that the very same so-called evidence — Michael J. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information” — can be found in the genomes, structures, and processes of parasites and pathogens, making them devastatingly effective at exploiting and destroying their hosts. In fact, Behe himself has, probably without realising it, used precisely such examples. The bacterial flagellum he highlights enables E. coli to move efficiently through our gut, causing sometimes fatal food poisoning. And his example of resistance to anti-malarial drugs in Plasmodium parasites illustrate how evolution equips them to continue killing hundreds of thousands of children every year while condemning millions more to cycles of malarial fever.

Now, new research has highlighted another gruesome example. The bacterium Yersinia pestis — responsible for multiple waves of plague throughout the Middle Ages — has been shown to have evolved into its highly lethal form only in relatively recent human history. Beginning with the “Plague of Justinian” about 1,500 years ago, Y. pestis unleashed pandemics that killed between 30% and 50% of Europe’s population.

An interdisciplinary team at the University of South Florida (USF) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), with collaborators in India and Australia, has now confirmed genomically that the Justinian plague was indeed caused by Y. pestis, as long assumed. Analysing DNA from plague victims buried in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan — the epicentre of that pandemic — one group identified the culprit, while another team traced the bacterium’s evolutionary changes that made it one of history’s most notorious killers.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Actively Killing Children With Malaria - If You Belive ID Creationists

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.

Malevolent Designer - We COULD Have Been Designed To Resist Snake Venom - Malevolence Or Evolution?

Major Skink, Bellatorias frerei

Major Skink, Bellatorias frerei

How Aussie skinks outsmart lethal snake venom - News - The University of Queensland

As though the recent news from the biological sciences wasn't already bad enough for creationists, we now have two examples demonstrating how—if an omnibenevolent, omniscient deity really had designed humans as the pinnacle of creation—it could have done a far better job. Yet, apparently, it chose not to.

The first, which is the subject of this blog post, involves a seemingly humble Australian lizard, the major skink (Bellatorias frerei), which possesses a simple mutation that renders it immune to Australian snake venom.

The second example, which I’ll cover in my next post, concerns the apple snail. This remarkable mollusc has an eye that is structurally and genetically similar to the mammalian eye—but unlike ours, it can regenerate if damaged or lost. But more on that later.

Australia is infamous for its venomous snakes—many of them deadly. Yet thanks to the widespread availability of antivenoms, there are only one or two fatalities annually, out of hundreds of snakebite cases.

However, if humans had been endowed with the same mutation as the skink, there would be no deaths at all—and no need for antivenoms. Interestingly, this is the same mutation that grants immunity to cobra venom in some mammals, such as mongooses and honey badgers. So, from a creationist perspective, there appears to be no good reason to deprive humans of this mutation — unless the designer was malevolent, indifferent, or just lazy.

It would pose an interesting challenge to intelligent design (ID) creationists to explain the "intelligence" in designing snakes to kill lizards with neurotoxic venom, only to then design lizards that are immune to it. Of course, creationists invariably avoid addressing these sorts of paradoxes—paradoxes which evolutionary biology easily explains as the outcome of an unintelligent evolutionary arms race.

These neurotoxic venoms work by binding to receptors on the surface of muscle cells and blocking the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This prevents muscle contraction, ultimately stopping respiration. The simple mutation in the skinks alters these receptors so that the venom can no longer bind effectively, neutralising its effects.

Malevolent Designer - How A Common Virus Sneaks Past Our Immune System And Causes Birth Defects

Scientists Uncover How a Common Herpes Virus Outsmarts the Immune System | School of Medicine | University of Pittsburgh.

Intelligent (sic) Design creationists have painted themselves into a corner.

Two of their most prominent arguments—irreducible complexity (Michael J. Behe) and complex specified information (William A. Dembski)—are intended to demonstrate the involvement of an intelligent designer in the natural world. But when these same criteria are applied to harmful parasitic organisms, such as the common herpesvirus (cytomegalovirus), which is the leading infectious cause of birth defects in the United States, the implication is that this virus too is the product of intentional design by the same creator that ID proponents insist is responsible for all life.

Within the framework of Intelligent Design creationism, the conclusion is inescapable: their designer deity—typically equated with the omniscient, omnibenevolent god of the Christian Bible—knowingly and deliberately created a pathogen that causes immense suffering. If ID logic is followed consistently, their deity is not a benevolent creator but a malevolent force that engineers disease and deformity with full foreknowledge of the consequences.

The only escape from this theological and philosophical bind is for ID creationists to refute their own criteria—to claim that irreducible complexity and complex specified information are compelling proof of design when found in beneficial biological systems, but somehow irrelevant or invalid when found in destructive pathogens. In doing so, they are forced to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs simultaneously.

In reality, these hallmarks of design touted by ID advocates are common outcomes of natural evolutionary processes — especially arms races between host defences and parasitic invaders. These processes are inherently unguided and wasteful, which in itself refutes the idea of intelligent planning.

Another striking example of this evolutionary struggle has just been published in Nature Microbiology by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Their study sheds light on how the herpesvirus has evolved sophisticated strategies to evade the immune system — a feature that ID logic would classify as evidence of "design."

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: