Malevolent Design - How Cancer Reprograms The Immune System To Work For It, Not Against It - Malevolence or Evolution?

Tumour containing infiltrating neutrophils. In light grey, tumour cells. Among the infiltrating neutrophils, some do not express CCL3 (blue), while others are CCL3 positive (red). CCL3-positive neutrophils are highly conserved across tumour types and promote the growth of growing tumours.

© Mikaël Pittet – UNIGE

Immune 'hijacking' predicts cancer evolution - Medias - UNIGE

A recent research paper in Cancer Cell, published by a team from the Université de Genève (Unige), Switzerland, led by Professor Mikaël Pittet, describes how neutrophils — key cells of the immune system — can be reprogrammed by cancer cells and then co-opted to drive the cancer’s progression.

This process depends entirely on the presence of multiple interacting components and on specific genes being expressed in both the tumour cells and the neutrophils. Without such irreducible complexity and so-called complex specified genetic information, these cancers would fail to progress.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that, if we accept the Intelligent Design creationists’ argument for design — namely irreducible complexity and complex specified information — then the inescapable conclusion is that this putative designer must also be the evil genius behind cancers, parasites, pathogens, genetic disorders, congenital diseases, and all the suffering they entail, along with the vast medical resources required to combat them.

Far from being the reputedly omnibenevolent and compassionate god of the Bible, creationism’s designer becomes the exact opposite: randomly mendacious and obsessively sadistic, toiling relentlessly to devise ever more ways to increase suffering in the world.

And yet creationists appear to prefer us to adopt that view of their favourite deity rather than accept the evidence that such systems have evolved — and that what we see in cancers, parasites, and pathogens is precisely what the Theory of Evolution predicts, with no supernatural malice or intent involved. For some reason, Intelligent Design creationists often seem more concerned with disproving “Darwinism” for political purposes than with promoting the god of the Bible or Qur’an.

This apparent paradox goes a long way towards explaining why they have so little hesitation in bearing false witness against scientists, misleading their followers with disinformation, and spreading blatant falsehoods. There is no pro-truth agenda in creationism. There is, however, a thinly veiled political agenda: the establishment of theocratic government — first in the USA, then elsewhere — dragging society back towards the pre-Enlightenment world of the so-called Dark Ages, when ignorance, fear, and superstition allowed unelected and unaccountable religious clerics to rule unchecked, and for most people at the lower strata of a hierarchical society, life was nasty, brutish and short.

Abiogenesis News - The Genes That Predate Life

Scientists describe a window into evolution before the tree of life | Oberlin College and Conservatory | EurekAlert!

In a paper published recently in the journal Cell Genomics, scientists Aaron Goldman (Oberlin College), Greg Fournier (MIT), and Betül Kaçar (University of Wisconsin–Madison) describe how they were able to study evolutionary history even before the last universal common ancestor of all living things (LUCA) emerged, and discovered that some of the genes associated with LUCA may in fact predate LUCA itself.

Creationists determined to misrepresent the process of abiogenesis often present it as a ridiculous parody in which a fully complex cell is supposed to have spontaneously assembled out of inorganic atoms and molecules. This straw-man caricature is far easier to attack than what science actually proposes: that the first population of self-replicating proto-cells arose through gradual chemical and evolutionary processes within a large and diverse population.

Within such a population, variation would inevitably occur, and whatever produced the most copies of itself would come to dominate. One of the earliest characteristics to emerge would have been rapid replication, because in a vast population with generation times measured in minutes, even “million-to-one” mutations are not rare events — they occur thousands of times a day. Under such conditions, what creationists portray as wildly improbable becomes not only plausible, but effectively inevitable over time.

Several independent evolutionary pathways could also have developed in parallel: RNA molecules coding for particular enzymes, ribosomes assembling from self-catalysing RNA, and primitive membranes forming across which chemical energy gradients could arise. Only once these components were already present could they come together within an enclosing membrane to form the first true prokaryotic cells.

The research team led by Aaron Goldman has now developed a method for determining which genes were likely present in LUCA, and which must already have been available to be incorporated when LUCA first emerged. In other words, some genes appear to predate LUCA itself, pushing parts of evolutionary history even deeper into the pre-cellular past.

What Was LUCA — and What Came Before It? The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is often misunderstood, especially by creationists who portray it as the very first living organism. In reality, LUCA was not the origin of life, nor the first cell, nor some single creature that suddenly appeared fully formed.

LUCA is simply the most recent population of organisms from which all life alive today ultimately descends — bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes alike. Crucially, LUCA already possessed a level of biochemical sophistication. Most researchers agree it likely had:

• a genetic code based on RNA and DNA
• ribosomes capable of translating RNA into proteins
• enzymes for metabolism and replication
• membrane structures maintaining internal chemistry
• the ability to exploit chemical energy gradients

This means LUCA could not have been the beginning of life. Instead, it must have been the product of a long evolutionary history that preceded it.

Pre-LUCA Evolution: A World of Competing Proto-Life

Before LUCA, early Earth was almost certainly home to a diverse population of simpler self-replicating systems — sometimes called proto-cells or pre-cellular life. These were not fully modern organisms, but chemical systems capable of reproduction, variation, and selection.

Rather than a single miraculous event, abiogenesis is best understood as an extended evolutionary process in which:

• self-replicating molecules competed for resources
• advantageous variants spread through populations
• metabolic pathways evolved gradually
• membranes formed to enclose and stabilise reactions
• genetic and protein machinery became increasingly integrated

LUCA represents the point at which one lineage became the common ancestor of everything that survived, not the moment life began.

Genes Older Than LUCA

What makes the new research so significant is the finding that some genes associated with LUCA appear to be even older — suggesting that early evolutionary innovations were already circulating in the pre-LUCA world and later became incorporated into the first universal ancestor.

This is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: life did not begin with a fully formed cell, but with populations of evolving systems, long before anything resembling modern biology existed.

Their methodology is explained further in a press release from Oberlin College, via EurekAlert!.

Refuting Creationism - Bonobos Can Imagine Things Detached From Reality

Apes share human ability to imagine | Hub

A paper published recently in Science should give creationists something to think about. It shows how our close relatives, the bonobos, can imagine things completely detached from physical reality — rather like children playing games of pretend, or creationists pretending they are leading experts on biology and understand the subject better than the actual experts.

In this study, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that bonobos can engage in imaginative “pretend play”, an ability long assumed to be uniquely human. In doing so, they dismantle yet another supposed human-exclusive trait that creationists cite as evidence of special creation.

In one experiment with a captive bonobo, Kanzi — a 43-year-old individual living at Ape Initiative — a researcher pretended to pour juice from an empty jug into a transparent empty cup, and then pour it again into a second empty cup. When asked, “Where is the juice?”, Kanzi correctly identified the second cup.

In a similar experiment, an imaginary grape was taken from an empty bowl and placed into an empty jar. When asked, “Where is the grape?”, Kanzi again correctly pointed to the jar.

These experiments show that Kanzi was able to imagine and successfully track the movement of invisible, non-existent objects — something human children can typically do by the age of about two.

Creationism Refuted - A Football-sized Vegetarian - From 307 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A Shoreline scene in the Carboniferous

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern.

Illustration by Hannah Fredd.

Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat its veggies - Field Museum

We have another example today of how the evidence written into the fossil record — which creationists insist either does not exist, or is at best a lie forged to deceive us — stubbornly refuses to conform to creationist requirements. Instead, it continues to tell the only story it can: of life evolving slowly over deep time on a planet that is billions of years old.

The latest example comes from a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the Smithsonian Museum. The study was co-led by Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum.

The paper presents evidence of the earliest known herbivorous vertebrate — dating to some 307 million years before creationists believe the Earth was created. Once again, this highlights the fundamental problem creationists face when they begin with a dogmatic belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because a handful of Bronze Age pastoralists said so. Having declared in advance that there has been no significant evolution, only minor variation within “kinds”, they are then forced to twist and contort the real-world evidence in a futile attempt to shoehorn it into their absurdly compressed timescale.

The animal, named Tyrannoroter heberti by the researchers, evolved over the tens of millions of years since the first vertebrates transitioned from lobe-finned fish to terrestrial tetrapods around 375 million years ago — perhaps to escape aquatic predators, or to exploit the invertebrate prey that had already colonised the land. Plants, meanwhile, which had begun spreading onto land some 475 million years ago, had also been evolving, and by this time were well established as ferns, horsetails, and other tough early vegetation.

Tyrannoroter heberti, known so far from a single skull, was probably among the largest terrestrial animals alive at the time, reaching around a foot in length — roughly the size of an American football — based on the proportions of close relatives. The fossil was recovered from shoreline cliffs in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

It is thought to represent a stem amniote: part of the lineage of vertebrates that evolved the ability to lay eggs away from water, unlike amphibians which must still return to water to reproduce. This group ultimately gave rise to reptiles, birds, and mammals — in other words, to almost the entire later terrestrial vertebrate world, including ourselves.

Creationism Refuted - Why We Need Our Gut Microbiome To Keep Us Healthy

Gut microbiome - AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Electron microscopic image of rod-shaped gut bacteria.

© Bacteria in the gut. NIH Image Gallery/Donny Bliss, NIH

What gut bacteria like

An open access paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is a stunning example of the ludicrous complexity evolution has produced — the exact antithesis of what an intelligent designer would create, if such a designer were anything more than grossly incompetent. As I explain in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax, and as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the hallmark of intelligent design should be minimal complexity and maximal efficiency. And yet what we find in humans — and in just about every other bilaterian animal with a gut — is a vast, intricate symbiotic microbiome supplying functions that could far more simply have been provided directly, with even a little forethought on the part of any competent designer.

Instead, in the sort of convoluted complexity that creationists like to attribute to their putative designer god, but which is in reality a hallmark of evolved systems, we see yet another example of a biological arrangement that betrays not intelligence, but its absence.

The paper, by an international team led by Professor Victor Sourjik and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, the University of Ohio, and Philipps-University Marburg, describes how an interdependent gut microbiome helps to keep both the microorganisms and their host healthy. They show that this complex and dynamic community is governed by countless chemical interactions — not only among the microorganisms themselves, but also between microbes and host tissues. The perception of nutrients and signalling molecules by gut bacteria is therefore crucial in maintaining these relationships.

One key role of this microbiome is in deterring and combating pathological species which would otherwise find the gut — with its warmth and steady supply of pre-digested nutrients — an ideal environment to colonise. This must have been a problem even for the earliest animals with a digestive tract: a vulnerability effectively built into the body plan. The solution, in the form of beneficial commensal organisms, is therefore probably as old as the first tube-like bilaterians themselves.

The problem the human gut faces in this respect can be gauged from the fact that some studies have shown that 50-55% or more of the dry weight of human faces is bacteria, dead and alive[1] , with populations of bacteria in the order of 10¹¹ bacteria per gram![2] Imagine then the opportunities this presents to a potentially pathological bacteria with a generation time in minutes. With a population exploding exponentially, the potential to overwhelm the host in a few days is enormous. This is the scale of the problem, and of the selection pressure to overcome it, that has produced this massively complex solution, because it wasn't solved in the initial 'design' stage.

Since it worked well enough, there has been no evolutionary pressure to replace it with a less vulnerable gut, or one better equipped to cope with infection without relying on an entire ecosystem of different microorganisms to maintain health. In other words, what we have today is the result of more than half a billion years of evolutionary history since this basic body plan first emerged in the Cambrian.

Malevolent Design - How Ovarian Cancer Looks Intelligently Designed to Spread Rapidly

Creationism's intelligent designer at work

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Cancer cells (red) stick to mesothelial cells (green) and form hybrid spheres that cut into surrounding abdominal tissue.

Credit: Uno et al., 2026

Scientists now know why ovarian cancer spreads so rapidly in the abdomen | Nagoya University

If intelligent design advocates were honest enough to follow the logic of their own arguments and apply it consistently to the real world, they ought to be acutely embarrassed by the deity they are presenting to the public. Their putative designer god, judged by the evidence they themselves cite, looks less like a benevolent engineer and more like the author of suffering, disease, and death.

That uncomfortable reality is illustrated by yet another research paper showing that pain and mortality can be the direct result of the very things ID proponents celebrate as hallmarks of design: irreducible complexity and “complex specified information”.

This latest example comes from scientists at Nagoya University, Japan, who have shown how ovarian cancer forms an alliance with healthy cells that enables it to spread rapidly to other organs in the abdomen. Their paper has just been published in Science Advances.

As regular readers will be aware, a recurring theme of this blog is that ID advocates conspicuously ignore the vast number of examples from parasitology, oncology, and genetics where the very evidence they cite for an intelligent designer applies just as readily to diseases caused by parasites, pathogens, and genetic malfunctions. Applying ID’s own logic, these are not signs of benevolent craftsmanship but evidence of something far darker — a malevolent intent behind the supposed designer.

The paper in Science Advances is yet another case in point, and doubtless there will be many more soon.

The authors discovered that ovarian cancer cells gather clusters of mesothelial cells from the peritoneum and form hybrid spheres. These protect the cancer cells, help them invade other organs, and create a pathway for metastasis throughout the abdomen. Worse still, these hybrid spheres resist chemotherapy more effectively than cancer cells alone.

If something this complex resulted in something beneficial for humans, Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski would doubtless have produced one or more books about it, written magazine articles, and embarked on television tours explaining how the finding devastates “Darwinism” and constitutes scientific proof of an intelligent designer — leaving their audiences in no doubt that the locally favoured god is the only entity capable of producing such complexity.

As it is, we can expect only a deafening silence from the Discovery Institute, while their hapless supporters cast about for a fundamentalist religious excuse such as “the Fall”, or perhaps invoke some other evil agent — anything, in fact, except the god of the Bible, who is apparently only credited with designing good things.

Refuting Creationistm - An Evolutionary Trap That No Intelligent Designer Would Blunder Into

Sceptobius beetles in an ant colony

The evolutionary trap that keeps rove beetles alive

A new study reported in Cell describes an extraordinary example of evolutionary adaptation unfolding right under our noses — and it will make uncomfortable reading for anyone still clinging to the creationist fantasy that living systems were neatly “designed” in their present form a few thousand years ago.

Researchers from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, CA. USA, investigating the symbiotic relationship between certain rove beetles and their ant hosts have shown how these beetles have evolved the ability to infiltrate ant colonies by chemically disguising themselves as ants. Far from being “created” to live harmoniously together, this is an evolutionary arms-race in miniature: ants have evolved sophisticated chemical recognition systems to detect intruders, while the beetles have evolved equally sophisticated counter-measures to bypass those defences.

And the details are exactly the sort of thing intelligent design advocates never seem to anticipate. The beetles do not simply possess some magical, pre-installed “ant colony access” trait. Instead, evolution has shaped them into something far stranger and far less tidy: they suppress their own scent production and acquire the colony’s chemical signature directly from the ants themselves. In effect, they become living imposters — accepted not because the ants were “meant” to host them, but because natural selection has honed the beetles’ ability to exploit a biological loophole.

Refuting Creationism - A Gap-Filling Miniature Dinosaur from 120 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Paleo art reconstruction of Foskeia pelendonum.

Credit: Martina Charnell

Tiny new dinosaur Foskeia pelendonum reshapes the dinosaur f | Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), working with colleagues in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, have just described a remarkable new species of dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of northern Spain. Their findings are the subject of a read-only paper in Papers in Palaeontology.

The tiny herbivore, named Foskeia pelendonum, lived around 125 million years ago, yet it is already forcing palaeontologists to rethink part of the ornithopod family tree. The discovery provides another striking example of how the fossil record continues to grow in detail, resolution, and explanatory power.

This will come as an unwelcome development for creationists, who still cling to the claim that evolution is “just speculation” and that the fossil record contains no meaningful evidence of transitional relationships or evolutionary diversification. On the contrary, finds like Foskeia show exactly what evolutionary science predicts: new lineages appearing in the right strata, in the right environments, with a mixture of ancestral and derived traits that help clarify how later forms evolved.

Creationists will, of course, respond in the usual way. Some will insist that this dinosaur is “just another dinosaur”, as though classification and evolutionary relationships are irrelevant. Others will retreat to the vacuous assertion that it represents merely “variation within a kind”, without ever defining what a “kind” is or explaining why such variation produces a nested hierarchy that maps so precisely onto geological time. And as always, the more committed will simply dismiss the evidence altogether, because no amount of fossil discovery can compete with a belief system that must remain true regardless of what the rocks contain.

Yet the significance of Foskeia pelendonum lies precisely in the details. This was not simply a juvenile form of a larger dinosaur, but a genuinely small-bodied species, confirmed by bone histology to have reached adulthood. Even more intriguingly, it possessed unexpectedly specialised skull and dental features, showing that evolutionary change does not always follow the simplistic “bigger and more advanced” caricature imagined by creationists, but often proceeds through ecological experimentation, miniaturisation, and adaptation to local conditions.

Far from undermining evolutionary theory, discoveries like this strengthen it. They refine the dinosaur family tree, help fill long-recognised gaps in the ornithopod record, and demonstrate once again that the history of life is written not in Bronze Age mythology but in the sedimentary archive of deep time — an archive that continues to contradict creationism with every new fossil unearthed.

Refuting Creationism - How A Chance Mutation Allowed The Evolutionary Transition From Invertebrates To Vertebrates

Sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis

Credit: Shunsuke Sogabe

New discovery sheds light on evolutionary crossroads of vertebrates | University of St Andrews news

Researchers from the University of St Andrews, working with colleagues from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Oxford, have identified a pattern of gene evolution that appears to have been crucial to the origin and subsequent diversification of vertebrates from their common ancestry with invertebrates. They have just published their findings in BMC Biology.

This discovery will be a major disappointment for creationists who cling to the notion that there is no evidence for what they call “macroevolution” — a term so ill-defined that it can be stretched to mean whatever a creationist happens to need at the time. Sometimes it is invoked to mean the origin of a new species, at other times a new genus, an entire new order, or even the biologically absurd idea of one species giving birth to an individual belonging to a completely different order. More often, though, “macroevolution” is said to mean the origin of entirely new anatomical structures.

Even that definition collapses immediately under scrutiny. Asked what novel structure humans possess that chimpanzees lack, “macroevolution” abruptly becomes the evolution of anything creationists choose to label a “kind” — another conveniently nebulous term, defined precisely nowhere and flexibly everywhere.

Yet if the origin and diversification of vertebrates does not qualify as “macroevolution”, it is difficult to imagine what possibly could. The St Andrews–led team has shown that this transition was enabled by gene evolution — that is, mutation acted upon by natural selection — affecting the genetic control of cell signalling during embryonic development. These changes influence when and where new cell types arise as a developing embryo progresses from a single-celled zygote to a complex multicellular organism, complete with differentiated tissues and specialised organs.

As this gene regulatory system evolved, it allowed the vertebrate phylum to diversify into the many classes and orders that now dominate marine and terrestrial ecosystems. No doubt this will require yet another round of misrepresentation by creationists, along with further blurring of the already elastic definitions of “macroevolution” and “kinds”.

Creationism Refuted - How The Fossil Record Tracks Climate Change

Tata Aka (CC BY 2.0)
via Wikimedia Commons

The climate in Catalonia was much rainier 10 million years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

A paper published a few days ago in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution describes how the climate in Catalonia was much wetter 10 million years ago than it is today, with rainfall roughly twice the present rate, and how this was reflected in the evolution of mammals in the region. The study was conducted by palaeontologists at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA), in association with colleagues from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

This must be deeply frustrating for creationists because, no matter how much they ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or shout abuse at scientists, the evidence stubbornly refuses to support creationism and invariably supports evolution over deep time on an ancient Earth. The findings presented in this paper are, of course, no exception.

Scientists have previously established a close link between rainfall and the composition of mammalian communities, with wetter conditions favouring insectivores. Increased rainfall promotes the development of forests, which in turn provide abundant niches for insects and other invertebrates—the primary food source of insectivorous mammals. This relationship between small mammals and climate was first studied in detail by Jan van Dam, an associate researcher at the ICP. Van Dam developed equations that allow both average annual rainfall and its seasonal distribution to be estimated from fossil assemblages of small mammals.

Building on that earlier work, the present study analyses the abundant fossil record of small mammals to reconstruct populations that changed dynamically through time in response to shifting climatic conditions—exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence of spontaneous creation of species, nor of a global biological reset caused by a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago.

Unintelligent Design - A Bacterium That Goes Wrong And Self-Destructs

SAR11 bacteria comprise some 40% of marine bacterial cells, making them an essential part of our ocean ecosystems.

Image source: Smithsonian / Xiaowei Zhao.

One of Earth’s most abundant organisms is surprisingly fragile

Microbiologists at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered that one of Earth’s most abundant species, the SAR11 bacterium, has a fundamental — and potentially fatal — ‘design’ flaw. They have just published their findings in Nature Microbiology, and it should make grim reading for any creationists with sufficient courage to read it.

When you have trillions of copies, what does it matter to ‘selfish’ genes if a few billion go wrong and end up destroying the organisms they travel through time in? For an evolved organism, it matters not one tittle or jot to its genes, because they can always produce more copies. So long as there is a sufficiently large population to keep replicating, they will continue to exist and reproduce — and they have no other ultimate function. This is all they evolved to do.

But could we say the same for an organism designed by an omniscient, intelligent designer? What would be intelligent about creating an organism that, under particular but entirely predictable conditions, attempts to reproduce but succeeds only in making repeated copies of its DNA, fails to divide, and enters a runaway cycle of replication until it becomes so disorganised that it can no longer survive and effectively self-destructs?

SAR11 dominates the surface waters of the world’s oceans and accounts for around 40% of marine bacterial cells. As such, it is a vital component at the base of the marine food chain, and is so successful partly because of a process known as genetic streamlining — the evolutionary loss of genes to reduce energy demands in nutrient-poor environments. This alone is not the main problem for creationists to explain, although it does raise the obvious question of why a designer would burden an organism with a genetic load it does not need in the first place.

The real problem is that this streamlining, as an evolved process, comes at a cost. In shedding a load of mostly surplus genes, some essential ones are lost too — including genes that regulate the cell cycle. The result is a failure to divide after genome replication, with the cell instead entering an uncontrolled loop of DNA replication without division.

How on Earth can that be regarded as intelligent design? The organism does exactly what it is ‘designed’ to do under conditions of low nutrient stress, but in doing so falls into an inescapable trap. The consequence is that populations continue to decline even when nutrients later become available again — with potentially serious knock-on effects for other species higher up the food chain.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ecosystem reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry around 150 million years ago in Colorado, the United States

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

AI-generate image (ChatGPT5.2)

Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Malevolent Design - How Complex Specified Genetic Information and Irreducible Complexity Cause Pancreatic Cancer

Study reveals protein linked to spread of pancreatic cancer through nerves

A paper just published in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology shows how precisely the sort of complex specified information and irreducible complexity that Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe proclaim as evidence of intelligent design can instead combine to ensure that pancreatic cancer survives, metastasises, and ultimately kills its victims.

This, of course, is true of many diseases, which simply would not exist unless the right combination of genetic information were present and functioning correctly for the disease itself. Yet creationists routinely compartmentalise their beliefs so that harmful “designs” are excluded and blamed on something else, while only those features that appear to benefit humans are credited to a designer.

In the case of parasites, what is harmful to humans is often beneficial to the parasite, but once again the presence of harm causes the logic of creationist arguments to shift. No longer is this evidence of intelligent design, but of something called “sin”, which appears to operate as an autonomous entity capable not only of corrupting creation but of designing living organisms and manipulating their genomes. The formerly omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient designer god now seems strangely impotent, indolent, or indifferent in the face of this alternative “designer”.

This theology also sits uncomfortably alongside another core fundamentalist belief: that God has a plan for everyone, and that everything that happens in a person’s life occurs as part of this divine plan. Presumably, then, that plan must include any diseases they suffer from, including cancer.

It is therefore difficult to see how creationists can escape the conclusion that their god designs and causes cancer as part of this plan, while continuing to cling to the claim that intelligent design is inherently benevolent.

Creationism Refuted - Termite Evolution By Loss Of Genetic Information and Complexity

Physogastric termite queen (top left) of Macrotermes michaelseni being groomed by workers and the larger king, with soldiers in the foreground.

Photo by Jan Sobotnik

The giant northern termite Mastotermes darwiniensis showing the close relationship between termites and other cockroaches.

Public Domain, Link

Scientists solve the mystery of why termite kings and queens are monogamous - The University of Sydney

Researchers from the University of Sydney have just published a paper on termite evolution in Science which will make depressing reading for any creationists brave enough to attempt it. The study comprehensively refutes several articles of creationist faith.

A common creationist assertion is that loss of genetic information is invariably fatal, so mutations cannot be selected for during evolution. They also insist that evolution, as defined by science, is necessarily a process of increasing complexity, which they then claim would violate the laws of thermodynamics by reducing entropy.

The absurdity of this counter-factual claim is easy to see. Variation between individuals is due to genetic differences, and that variation is only possible if mutations generate novelty. Creationists also conveniently ignore the fact that entropy can decrease locally in open systems. Earth is very much an open system, with a continuous influx of energy from the Sun, so nothing in thermodynamics precludes local increases in order or complexity.

Moreover, the claim is demonstrably false. Many endoparasites, such as parasitic worms, have lost substantial amounts of genetic information as they evolved to rely on their hosts for key functions. Several intestinal worms, for example, have no digestive tract at all, because they absorb nutrients directly from their host’s gut. Evolution does not require an increase or a decrease in complexity as such; it requires only a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time.

The University of Sydney researchers have now identified another striking example of evolution by gene loss — this time in termites. Their results show a massive loss of genes as termites evolved extreme monogamy and sociality. Paradoxically, a reduction in genetic complexity at the individual level was accompanied by an increase in social complexity at the colony level.

Some of the lost genes are those responsible for producing sperm tails, meaning that termite sperm can no longer swim. This is likely a consequence of strict monogamy within the colony, which removes sperm competition altogether. In species where females mate with multiple males, there is strong selection pressure for highly motile sperm, because the fastest are more likely to fertilise the eggs. In termites, that pressure simply does not exist.

To reach these conclusions, the team — led by Professor Nathan Lo — compared the genomes of ‘domestic’ cockroaches (which share a common ancestor with termites), closely related wood roaches that live in small family groups, and multiple termite species exhibiting different levels of social complexity.

Refuting Creationism - Blood Tests On Ancient Fossils - And What They Can Tell Us

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Life in fossil bones: what we can learn from tiny traces of ancient blood chemicals

A paper recently published in Nature details the application of a new field known as palaeometabolomics to reconstruct ancient African environments and track how they changed over time.

Modern medicine can learn a great deal about our health and lifestyle from a blood test, because blood contains traces of metabolites derived from the food we eat, as well as indicators of liver and kidney function and how effectively metabolic waste is disposed of.

But what if we could perform blood tests on archaic animals and human ancestors? Over time, this could tell us not only what they ate, but how their diets changed, which in turn reveals changes in rainfall, temperature, vegetation cover — forest versus savannah — and the species that were hunted and consumed.

Unintelligent Design - One Design Blunder Led To Another And Ended Up Causing Cancer - Or Was It Deliberate?

A broken DNA repair tool accelerates aging | News from Goethe University Frankfurt

Researchers from Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, have shown how a faulty DNA repair mechanism triggers inflammation and leads to accelerated ageing, developmental abnormalities, and cancer.

Their findings are published in Science.

As I explained in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax, one of the hallmarks of an evolved system — and one which creationists have been conditioned to mistake for evidence of intelligent design — is complexity. In reality, the opposite is true: intelligently designed objects and processes are typically *minimally

complex, doing exactly what is required and no more.

One reason complexity arises in evolved systems is the need for additional layers of processes to compensate for the suboptimal designs that evolution inevitably produces. An intelligently designed process — especially one devised by a designer endowed with foresight — would require no such compensatory mechanisms. It would function reliably every time and be robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and other causes of malfunction. Nor would a perfectly designed copying process be prone to copying errors.

What we observe in reality, however, is an excessively complex system that still malfunctions — and when it does, it can do so unpredictably and catastrophically, leading to increased suffering and even death. The equivalent, in engineering terms, would be an aircraft manufacturer producing planes that were mostly safe most of the time, yet costly to build because they relied on intricate back-up systems to compensate for other components prone to failure — and which nevertheless suffered unpredictable mid-flight failures when those back-ups failed, causing aircraft to fall from the sky. Such an incompetent aircraft manufacturer would not remain in business for long.

In contrast to evolved systems which are overly complex and still prone to errors, an intelligently designed organism would be minimally complex, maximally efficient, robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and work perfectly every time. As so often, what ID predicts is not what we actually observe. In normal science, the falsification of a hypothesis is regarded as confirmation that the hypothesis was wrong, but in creationism the reverse holds; if the facts fail to confirm the hypothesis the facts must be wrong. The hypothesis must be clung to with grim determination, come what may.

Refuting Crationism - How Climate Change Shaped the Evolution of Kangaroos And Wallabies

Red-necked wallaby

QUT - Study maps climate-related evolution of modern kangaroos and wallabies

In a clear example of how evolution is driven by environmental change, a study by scientists at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), led by Professor Matthew J. Phillips, has shown how closely the evolution of Australia’s kangaroos and wallabies maps onto the continent’s long-term climate history. Their findings are published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

By tracing the climate record over the last 18 million years and comparing it with the fossil record, the team showed that increasing aridity and habitat variability around 7–9 million years ago coincided with the emergence of the macropodines — the group to which most modern kangaroos and wallabies belong. This was followed by the appearance of incipient grasslands around 5–4.5 million years ago, a period that saw a major diversification of kangaroo and wallaby species.

As expected, there is no evidence of sudden creation without ancestors 6,000–10,000 years ago, nor of a wholesale biological reset following a global flood a few thousand years ago. Instead, the record is one of gradual evolution over deep time, driven by environmental change. The long-predicted failure of the Theory of Evolution to explain and make sense of the evidence once again failed to materialise, as it has every time creationists have claimed it was imminent over the past half-century.

Rather than contradicting evolutionary theory, the evidence fits it like a hand in a glove, adding yet another piece to the growing mountain of supporting data. Once again, the underpinning theory of modern biology is shown to be supported by independent lines of evidence from geology, climatology, and palaeontology, all converging on the same conclusion: life has evolved on an ancient planet responding continuously to changing environments.

Refuting Creationism - How Camellias Evolved As The Japanese Islands Formed

Camellia japonica

Camellia Rusticana

How Camellias evolved with the formation of the Japanese archipelago? | News | NIIGATA UNIVERSITY

It's a basic principle of evolution that environmental changes drive evolution by isolating populations which are then free to evolve on their own trajectory, and by creating new ecological niches into which species can diversify.

An almost perfect example of this in progress can be seen in the Camellia group of plants, of which one, tea, Camellia cinensis is perhaps the most important economically, But several others are also important cultivated garden plants with bright red, pink or white flowers.

Another phenomenon of evolution that this group of plants displays is that evolution is not a sudden event but a slow process over time, during which hybridization and gene flow between related species occurs until barriers to hybridization have evolved.

This tendency to form hybrids and the general similar morphologies has made accurate classification of the different species, and subspecies difficult and a matter of debate among taxonomists and botanists.

Now work by a team led by Dr. Harue Abe of Niigata University, Sado, Niiagata, Japan have shown how the evolution and distribution of this genus was strongly influenced by the formation of the Japanese archipelago.

Malevolent Design - How The Toxoplasma Parasite Looks Intelligently Designed - To A Creationist

Toxoplasma gondii cyst in brain cell.

A) Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites, the rapidly multiplying form of the parasite. B) A bradyzoite cyst containing Toxoplasma gondii within a muscle fiber, showing the cyst wall and individual bradyzoites. C) Histological section of tissue with Toxoplasma gondii cysts. D) Microscopic image of a Toxoplasma gondii oocyst, responsible for environmental transmission.

source.

Scientists find hidden diversity inside common brain parasite | UCR News | UC Riverside

Another example of a nasty little parasite that bears all the hallmarks of the Discovery Institute’s supposed *“proof”* of intelligent design was unveiled today, when scientists from the University of California, Riverside published the results of their investigation into the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which infects up to a third of the global population. Their paper was published open access in Nature Communications. It has been released unedited to provide early access to the findings.

Ask Discovery Institute (DI) fellow Michael J. Behe for proof of intelligent design and he will produce multiple examples of what he terms “irreducible complexity”, claiming that such systems could not have evolved step by step and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural intelligent designer. Similarly, ask another DI fellow, William A. Dembski, for proof of intelligent design and he will produce examples of what he calls “complex specified genetic information”, which he claims likewise could not have evolved naturally and therefore must have been provided by a supernatural designer.

Curiously, however, when biologists point to examples of “irreducible complexity” or “complex specified genetic information” in pathogens or parasites — organisms whose sole apparent purpose is to make us ill or kill us, or at the very least to increase suffering in the world - as evidence that, if the ID creationists’ argument were granted, it would imply malevolent intent on the part of the intelligent designer, the response is either silence or retreat into theology. More often than not, the blame is shifted to “the Fall”, while the insistence remains that intelligent design is a genuine scientific alternative to “Darwinism”, and not merely Bible-literalist Christian fundamentalism under another name.

At this point, their supposed “proof” of intelligent design quietly evaporates. Behe will even attempt to argue that the random process he calls “genetic entropy” is responsible, thereby conceding that random processes can generate what Dembski describes as complex specified genetic information — while simultaneously insisting that such information cannot have evolved through random processes at all.

The UC Riverside team have now shown that Toxoplasma gondii is even more complex than previously thought. It was already known that the parasite invades the brain and other tissues, where it forms dormant cysts that can later be reactivated. Its preferred hosts are members of the cat family, and humans are most commonly infected via cats. In some secondary hosts, it has been shown to manipulate behaviour in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by a cat, thereby completing its life cycle. Infected mice, for example, actively seek out the presence of domestic cats, while chimpanzees develop a fascination with the scent of leopard urine. It is possible that effects observed in humans are an echo of this behaviour-modifying mechanism inherited from our evolutionary past.

The new research shows that these cysts are far more complex than simple dormant copies of the parasite. Instead, they are intricate assemblages of multiple sub-types, each with distinct biological functions. In this respect, the cyst exhibits some of the characteristics of a multicellular organism, including a degree of cellular specialisation.

Refuting Creationism - How The Transitional Ediacaran Biota Slowly Evolved Into The Cambrian Biota

Ediacaran fossils

How Did These Strange, Ancient Organisms Turn into Such Remarkable Fossils? | GSA News Release 26-01

A recent paper published in the journal Geology by three geologists from Yale, led by Dr Lidya G. Tarhan, explains how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in such exquisite detail, while the transition to the (mostly) soft-bodied Cambrian biota and the Cambrian diversification are so poorly represented in the fossil record. It turns out that this was due to the particular chemistry of Ediacaran seawater, which enabled dead organisms to be coated and encased in a fine layer of clay that protected and preserved their structure. As ocean chemistry changed, this fortuitous process became progressively less effective.

Creationists love few things more than a gap in scientific knowledge as somewhere to position their favourite god, presumably having been fooled into believing a false dichotomy — either science can currently explain it or God did it — or at least expecting their target audience to be fooled by it. Sadly for creationists, this has created an ever-decreasing number of places in which to force-fit their ever-shrinking little god, as science, with relentless, unstoppable efficiency, fills one gap after another.

One such gap which creationists regularly trot out and misrepresent is the so-called “Cambrian Explosion”, which they have been fooled into believing was a sudden event occurring at an instant in time, before which there were no multicellular organisms and after which a myriad diverse body plans all appeared overnight without ancestry.

This conveniently ignores two important facts: the pre-existing Ediacaran biota, and the fact that the Ediacaran biota transitioned into the Cambrian biota over a period of some 30 million years.

In reality, of course, there is no such gap — it exists only in the minds of those ignorant enough to believe the misrepresentation. However, there is, or rather was, a gap, and one which creationists would probably prefer not to think about. It was the lack of a good explanation for how the soft-bodied Ediacaran biota came to be preserved in the fossil record in such exquisite detail, while the Cambrian “explosion” only looks like a sudden event because so few of the (soft-bodied) transitional forms were preserved.

Certainly, once it began, the Cambrian was a period of exponential diversification during which hard body parts evolved as defensive structures such as shells, spines, and hard exoskeletons; offensive structures such as jaws; and organs of mobility such as limbs and fins. Also evolving were sense organs and nervous systems. It would have been astonishing almost beyond credibility if every step of a rapid diversification of initially soft-bodied organisms had contrived to leave a fossil record of every stage, so all we really have is an infrequent series of snapshots at discrete locations, each capturing a brief moment in a global evolutionary history lasting about 55 million years.