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 on 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.