Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted Red Squirrels To Spread Leprosy in Medieval England

Lepers having magic spells cast over them

Mycobacterium leprae

Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host: Current Biology

Few places in Europe or elsewhere were more pious than Medieval England, but still creationism's pestilential malevolence continued to make people suffer with diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and the related leprosy. Even the extreme measures taken by believers to atone for imaginary transgressions that had brought about the Black Death had failed to assuage the putative designer god who was believed to be visiting this pestilence upon people.

The superstitious Bible-based belief in evil spirits and 'sin' as the cause of disease led to the social stigma that made the disease so feared and led to the isolation of sufferers in lepper colonies, and often reduced to begging to stay alive. Poor nutrition and poor sanitation led to a worsening of the condition and, although these counter-measures were visibly ineffective, such was the belief in the Bible that it was inconceivable that the disease could be caused by anything other than 'sin' and evil demons being permitted to enter the victim.

The modern equivalent of this victim-blaming superstition can be found in the modern creationist tactic of blaming 'Sin' and 'genetic entropy' for parasites, with demons being replaced by 'entropy' to make it sound sciencey. It is of course, Bible-based superstition without supporting evidence.

And now, if you believe that stuff, there is evidence that creationism's putative designer god designed M. leprae to also infect red squirrels so they would act as a repository to spread leprosy. Red squirrels were common in those days and were often captured in the wild for pets or pelts. Their skins, when used for clothing, would have carried M. leprae and infected anyone who wore them - a brilliant strategy, if you hate people and want them to be sick, suffer and die.

Unintelligent Design News - How Creationism's Putative Designer 'Brilliantly' Designs Solutions To Problems It Supidly Designed

Two-spot spider mite, Tetranychus urticae

Two-spot spider mite (yellow form), Tetranychus urticae

Plants utilise drought stress hormone to block snacking spider mites | Sainsbury Laboratory

To start at the beginning because that's always a good place to start, plants need to get water and nutrients up to their leaves, so their 'designer' gave them a vascular system but without a pump, so, to maintain the upward flow, they need to evaporate away (or transpire) the water that just arrived in their leaves. They do this through tiny pores (or stomata; singular=stoma) that are just about visible to the naked eye, and clearly visible under a hand lens or a microscope.

These stomata are guarded by guard cells, one on either side, which can swell to close the stoma or shrink to allow the stoma to open, as the need arises.

However, these stomata are an open invitation to sap-sucking arthropods such as mites and aphids, which are cleverly designed, reputedly by the same designer that designed the stomata, which can push their mouthparts into the stoma to get at the nutrient-rich watery contents of the leaf.

So, having designed these sap-suckers to exploit the transport system it designed for plants, creationism's putative designer clearly saw the sap-suckers it had designed as a problem to be solved.

How it added this Heath-Robinson layer of additional complexity to solve the problem the earlier layer of complexity had caused is the subject of a research paper by a collaboration of researchers from the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP), Spain, and Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (SLCU), Cambridge, UK and a news release from Cambridge University:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pathogen Is Designed to Cause UTIs

Escherichia coli,
The usual cause of urinary tract infection (UTI)

UTI's will affect 50% of women at some time in their lives

How E. coli get the power to cause urinary tract infections | Michigan Medicine

Despite their protestations that their god doesn't create pathogens - some other creative entity does that, apparently - they have been in love with Escherichia coli, or E. coli ever since their guru and Deception Insitute flunky, Michael J Behe, persuaded them that he had 'proved' their god exists and designs things because he couldn't work out how the E. coli flagellum could have evolved - so God did it!

There problem then, courtesy of Michael J Behe is that they have accepted that, if there was a designer involved in E. coli's design, it is the god that Michael J Behe 'proved' designed it, so their god designs pathogens, and even designs clever way to make them good at making us sick.

With that in mind, which creationist is going to argue against Michael J Behe's clever 'proof' that their god designs things so must exist, and insist that it isn't also behind the newly discovered way it manages to cause urinary tract infections (UTIs)?

The discovery that they can live, reproduce, and do their nasty thing in the otherwise near-sterile urinary tract, was made by researchers at the laboratory of Professor Harry Mobley in the University of Michigan Medical School.

Having been filtered by the kidneys, while urine contains some chemicals such as metabolites, it is about as sterile as it gets, with anything in it entering through the urethral meatus, in women, stupidly placed near the anus and inside the vulva where it can become infected during sexual intercourse by a penis cleverly designed with a foreskin to harbour pathogens under.

It has now been discovered that E. coli is also cleverly 'designed' to grab the nutrients it needs but can't manufacture itself by have a highly efficient transport system for taking them from its victims at a rate of thousands of molecules a second. One of the genes responsible for this, codes for an enzyme known as ATP-binding cassette (ABC).

Typical of creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer, if you believe in such a thing, is the Heath-Robinson workaround for the lack of genes for manufacturing these amino acids, where the parasite needs an energy-intensive ATP-based transport system, complete with multi-layered back-up systems to keep them working - the needless waste and needless complexity, so typical of evolved systems and the antithesis of intelligently designed systems. The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal PNAS and explained them in a University of Michigan news release:

Creationism in Crisis - The Origin of Modern Plants - 550 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Microscope image of Zygnema circumcarinatum, a filamentous alga with a star-shaped chloroplast.

Photo: Dr Tatyana Darienko

Green planet - from small beginnings 550 million years ago.

Genomes of “star algae” shed light on origin of plants - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

One of the prerequisites for irreducible complexity to emerge naturally without needing a designer is for the components to be there either as part of a pre-existing structure, or as the result of neutral mutations that have been retained because there is no selection pressure to get rid of them.

This was the situation the first land plants found themselves in about 550 million years ago when gene and genome duplication had created redundant genes that could mutate, diversify, and eventually provide the complex metabolic machinery to enable the marine algae to colonize the land and so beginning the greening of the planet. The result was the appearance of a sudden, one-off event that created the ancestor of land plants.

This is the conclusion of a large international team led by scientists from the Universities of Göttingen and Nebraska–Lincoln, who have published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Genetics and explained it in a University of Göttingen news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Had Domesticated Dogs At Least 10 Thousands Years Before 'Creation Week'

Siberian grey wolf, Canis lupus

Source: Pinterest

Siberian wolf, Canis lupus

Ancient Mitogenomes Reveal the Maternal Genetic History of East Asian Dogs | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

These days, no serious scientist sets out to prove the Bible is wrong; discovering truth does that anyway - for anyone who can join the dots and do the simple logic. For example, humans could not have domesticated dogs some 23,000 years ago in Siberia by domesticating the local variety of grey wolf, if the Universe is just 10,000 years old.

And yet a paper published recently in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution shows that they did exactly that.

In the context of mitochondrial DNA, what are haplotypes? In the context of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), haplotypes refer to specific combinations of genetic variants or polymorphisms within the mitochondrial genome. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, mtDNA is passed down exclusively from the mother to all of her offspring. This maternal inheritance pattern makes mtDNA useful for studying ancestry, population genetics, and evolutionary history.

A haplotype represents a unique combination of nucleotide variations or mutations along the mtDNA sequence. By analyzing these haplotypes, researchers can track maternal lineages, study population migrations, and infer evolutionary relationships among different groups of individuals. Haplotypes are often used in studies of human populations, as well as in forensic genetics and medical research related to mitochondrial disorders.

Refuting the Bible was almost certainly not the intention of the authors, jointly led by Songmei Hu, of Joint International Research Laboratory of Environmental and Social Archaeology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China, and Xijun Ni and Qiaomei Fu, both of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, but the facts they discovered do just that. They had set out to resolve the question of where exactly dogs had been domesticated, based on an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) is inherited through the maternal line, so an analysis of the geographical and temporal distribution of the various haplotypes of mDNA and how they relate to one another should give an indication of where and when the ancestral haplotype lived.

How the team did this is explained in their paper:

Creationism in Crisis - A Newly-Discovered Mammal From Colorado - From 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

OFFICIAL Denver Museum of Nature & Science : Colorado Discovery: Museum Scientists Identify New Species

Apart from some feathered dinosaurs that were destined to become birds, one of the few land vertebrates to survive the catastrophe that wiped out the remaining large dinosaurs and marine reptiles at the K-Pg boundary, was to go one to give rise to the entire mammalian order. They were small fury, probably nocturnal insectivores.

The fossil of one of these, from 65 million years ago (at about the time of the K-Pg mass extinction), has recently been discovered by Denver Museum of Nature scientists in Colorado, at Corral Bluffs, near Colorado Springs.

According to a press release from Denver Museum of Nature & Science: Denver Museum of Nature & Science researchers are excited to announce the fossil discovery of a species of a 65-million-year-old mammal that was collected in the Corral Bluffs area on the edge of Colorado Springs. The newly discovered species, named Militocodon lydae, is part of a group of animals that gave rise to all modern hoofed mammals, including deer, cows and pigs. The fossil skull and jaws of Militocodon lydae were uncovered from rocks dating back to just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Roughly the size of a chinchilla, Militocodon lydae provides important clues about the explosive diversification of mammals in the wake of the dinosaur extinction.

Rocks from this interval of time have a notoriously poor fossil record and the discovery and description of a fossil mammal skull is an important step forward in documenting the earliest diversification of mammals after Earth’s last mass extinction.

Dr. Tyler Lyson, co-author
Museum Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology
Department of Earth Sciences
Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, CO, USA.

How and when life rebounded in the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs has been shrouded in mystery due to a poor fossil record. But thanks to an extraordinary discovery of remarkably complete fossils from Corral Bluffs, as well a recently awarded collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation's Frontier Research in Earth Sciences, Museum scientists and collaborators are now able to paint a vivid picture of how and when life rebounded after Earth’s darkest hour. The study, published in April 2024, was led by Dr. Lucas Weaver, Kent State University, and Jordan Crowell, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. The researchers named the mammal Militocodon lydae in honor of two extraordinary contributors to the Corral Bluffs project: volunteer and retired Colorado Springs teacher Sharon Milito and Museum supporter and champion of Colorado Springs Lyda Hill.

Creationism in Crisis - More Lousy News For Creationists - Human Evolution Mapped In The Genome Of Head Lice Symbiotic Bacteria

Human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis

Gilles San Martin via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Phylogenetic trees for primate lice and their vertebrate hosts redrawn from Reed et al . [9]. Trees are shown as cladograms with no branch length information, and are based on molecular and morphological data. Dashed lines between trees represent host-parasite associations. Humans are unique in being parasitized by two genera (Pediculus and Pthirus). (Herd, K.E., Barker, S.C. & Shao, R.(2015))

Photo credits: J. W. Demastes, T. Choe, and V. Smith.

Genomic Diversity in the Endosymbiotic Bacteria of Human Head Lice | Molecular Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic

It's a basic principle of evolutionary biology that an obligate commensal, symbiotic or parasitic organism is evolutionary bound to the organism on which it is dependent, It follows then that the genomes of two or more organism in such a relationships will reflect the same major changes which drive evolution.

I have previously described how the evolutionary tree of the human head and body lice, Pediculus humanus, fits exactly on the evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens as we diverged from the common ancestor with chimpanzees. At the same time, our lice diverged from a common ancestor they share with the lice which are obligate parasites on chimpanzees, Pe. schaeffi.

Interestingly, our lice also reflect when we started wearing clothes having lost our body hair. This loss of body hair meant our lice became head lice which are closely related to the chimpanzee's body lice. When we started wearing clothes our lice diverged into two subspecies - head lice, Pe. h. capitis, and body lice, Pe. h. humanus.

And now, something even more interesting and confirmative of evolution, is the discovery that an obligate, symbiont bacteria on which the lice depends, shows exactly the same pattern of divergence, mapped onto the evolutionary tree of the lice.

The symbiotic bacterium, Candidatus Riesia pediculicola, in a typically Heath-Robinson solution to a problem which is a characteristic of mindless, unplanned evolution, and unlike anything an intelligent designer would design, is essential to the lice because they can't make essential B-vitamins and don't get them from the blood on which they exclusively feed.

And, incidentally, these bacteria have evolved by loss of genetic information - something that creationist frauds tell their dupes is impossible because "every loss of genes is invariably fatal" [sic].

This discovery is the subject of a recent open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology & Evolution:

Creationism in Crisis - A Microorganism That Manipulates It's Host To Make The Nutrients It Needs

Electron microscopy showing the parasitic Candidatus Nanohaloarchaeum antarcticus: the small circular shape, attached to its host, Halorubrum lacusprofundi.

Image Credit: Joshua N Hamm

Another example of the parasitic Candidatus Nanohaloarchaeum antarcticus attached to its host, Halorubrum lacusprofundi.

Image Credit: Joshua N Hamm

Archaea can be picky parasites - NIOZ

The Bible is silent on the subject of microorganisms because they were unknown to the Bronze Age authors. But now we know better than them, we can see other ways in which they refute several basic creationist dogmas.

Firstly, there is the problem that creationists always struggle with when they don't avoid it altogether - that of parasites and how they fit into a world 'designed' by an omnibenevolent god who wishes to minimise the about of suffering in the world. More on this later…

Then the fact that archaea and bacteria could be different forms of life which arose independently showing that abiogenesis is not only possible but may have happened twice on Earth. And as they both have the same genetic 'code' this suggests that the 'code' was inevitable, not some special creation requiring a magician to produce it.

But that's a minority view; the consensus being that they have a common ancestor from which they diverged about 3.5 billion years ago.

Creationism in Crisis - How Neanderthals Were Burying Their Dead - 65,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Scientists have produced a remarkable reconstruction of what a Neanderthal woman would have looked like when she was alive. It is based on the flattened, shattered remains of a skull whose bones were so soft when excavated they had the consistency of "a well-dunked biscuit". Researchers first had to strengthen the fragments before reassembling them. Expert palaeoartists then created the 3D model.

BBC Studios

Shanidar Z: what did Neanderthals do with their dead?

Illustrated reconstruction of a Neanderthal man.

Hermann Schaaffhausen, 1888.

65,000 years before creationists believe the Universe existed, and before anatomically-modern humans had migrated out of Africa, a community of Neanderthals were living in a the Shanidar cave in what is now northern Iraq.

These Neanderthals also appear to have used the same cave in which to bury their dead, the skeletons of which are now being excavated to learn more about how these hominins lived.

And the picture emerges of a sophisticated people, very different from the brutal sub-human animals Victorian archaeologists depicted them as when Neanderthal remains were first discovered. Like many Creationists and US white supremacists today, Victorians were so wedded to the idea that modern (European) humans are the pinnacle of creation, that they could not conceive of the idea that there may once have been earlier humans who had anything approaching their level of sophistication.

One of the skeletons is of a man with a disabled arm who was probably deaf and had a head trauma that would have made him disabled and dependent, yet he had lived a long time, showing evidence of care and compassion.

Readers of Jean M. Auel's excellent series of imaginative, but painstakingly researched books about a Homo sapiens girl, Ayala, raised by Neanderthals will probably recognise Mog-ur, the Neanderthal tribal elder and shaman who befriended Ayala from that description...

The burials also suggest a sense of an after-life and care for the dead in that after-life. One skeleton is placed with its head pillowed on its hand presumably to make it comfortable.

One of the assembly of (female) skull fragments has been carefully removed from the rock matrix in which it was embedded and used to reconstruct her skull and then build a 3D reconstruction of how she would have appeared in life, for a BBC Netflix documentary on the excavation of the 35 individuals in the cave.

The work is the subject of an open access paper in the journal Antiquity and of a Cambridge University news article by Fred Lewsey:

Creationism in Crisis - Batty Evolution On Solomon Islands

Islands in the Vona Vona Lagoon of the New Georgia Group, Solomon Islands. This island group hosts four species of Hipposideros bats, including the two featured in the study of convergent evolution across the archipelago.

Credit: RG Moyle

Diadem leaf-nosed bat, Hipposideros diadema

Michael Pennay via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

Researchers parse oddity of distantly related bats in Solomon Islands that appear identical | KU News

There is something strange about the Solomon Islands, lying east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia. The bats that inhabit the islands seem to have evolved in ways that are difficult to understand.

Before creationists get over-excited and think we've found an example of species that didn't evolve but were made by magic, the question is not whether they evolved, but how? The scientists are in no doubt that the process was an evolutionary one and show no signs of concluding that a supernatural entity was involved. The puzzle is that genetically distinct species on different islands, occupying the same niche, have evolved such a high degree of phenotypic convergence that they are almost indistinguishable, so were previously classified as the same species, although genetically they are not even close relatives. The question is what is it about the environment on these islands that has driven this high level of convergence.

Each of the islands in the archipelago has a population of bats, usually 3-5 species on each island, consisting of a small, medium and large species and on islands with four species, an extra-large. One island has five species so gets an extra small bat.

That all seemed fairly straightforward on the assumption that the five distinct species had each found a niche on each island, and they certainly looked identical when comparing the different sized bats on each island. However, that was before we had DNA sequencing techniques.

DNA analysis has shown that the large bats on different islands, although identical in appearance, are not closely related - they have converged on that appearance from different ancestral bats.

This was discovered by a research team of scientists from University of Melbourne, Australia, the University of Kansas, USA, Jame Cook University, Australia and others. Their work is published open access in the journal, Evolution (the National Journal of Organic Evolution). It is explained in a University of Kansas news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Wake UP And Smell The Coffee - It Evolved 600,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Arabica coffee - the result of a random hybridization event

Coffea arabica

Newly sequenced genome reveals coffee’s prehistoric origin story — and its future under climate change - UBNow: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University at Buffalo

Creationists insist on seeing evolution as an event, not a process happening slowly over time, but there are a few rare examples where they are right - right by accident because few of them will have the courage to study evolutionary biology or even find out what it is and what processes cause it.

In the plant world, though not exclusively, new species arising by a single event such as hybridization between two related species which goes on to form a stable population that doesn't normally interbreed with either of the parent species, are fairly common. And one of them is the Arabica coffee plant, Coffea arabica, which is the result of a chance crossing between two diploid versions of Coffea canephora and Coffea eugenioides between 600,000 and 1,000,000 years ago to produce a state of allopolyploidia.

Because this represents such a narrow genetic bottle-neck with low genetic diversity, Arabic coffee is susceptible to infections and environmental hazards such as climate variability and soil conditions, so it needs carefully controlled conditions. It may well owe its long-term survival to the fact that it was cultivated by humans.

This was discovered by researchers at the University of Buffalo led by Victor Albert, Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences. Their paper is published, open access, in the journal Nature Genetics and their findings are explained in a University of Buffalo news release by Tom Dinki:

Creationism in Crisis - How Sabretoothed Cats Were Avoiding Broken Teeth - Before 'Creation Week'

Saber-toothed cat. Smilodon fatalis

Massimo Molinero

Smilodon fatalis skull

The double-fanged adolescence of saber-toothed cats | Berkeley

As an example of daft, Heath-Robinson design, the teeth of the North American sabre-toothed cat, Smilodon fatalis is a good as it gets. Obviously, having huge canine teeth with which to rip the throat out of large prey and so subdue it quickly, has some advantages, but the trouble is that the longer they are, the more likely they are to break, and broken teeth for a Smilodon could well have meant starvation and death. There needs to be a trade-off between ever-bigger teeth and death due to breakages.

And typical of creationism’s daft designer is the Heath-Robinson solution to a simple problem - you've guessed it, another layer of complexity. Instead of losing their 'milk teeth' like many mammals do as their head and mouth grows, Smilodon kept its milk teeth to act as a sort of splint for the adult Sabre tooth, reducing the lateral strain on the adult teeth until the adult was about 30 months old, by which time it had probably learned how to minimise lateral stress on its teeth.

This was discovered by Paleontologist Jack Tseng, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has published his findings in an open access paper in the journal The Anatomical Record. It is also explained in a University of California news release by Robert Sanders:

Creationism in Crisis - Yeast Evolution - Not Whether But How

Electron micrograph of budding yeast cells.

Ira Herskowitz and E. Schabtach

Electron micrograph of budding yeast cells

Photo: Ira Herskowitz and E. Schabtach

Bioinformatics professor discovers surprising evolutionary pattern in landmark yeast study | Inside UNC Charlotte | UNC Charlotte

As I've remarked before, trying to debate with creationists is like boxing with a brain-dead opponent who lacks the cognitive ability to know when they're down and out. Their lumbering body keeps flailing around and like a defeated Donald Trump, insists that they’ve won, and are triumphing over all-comers in the ring.

Creationist frauds have been telling their willfully ignorant cult that they are winning the debate against science and science is about to convert to creationist superstition and abandon the materialist explanations. The science that has produced all of modern technology, including the computers and Internet that they use to inform the world that science is all wrong, and magic done by an unproven supernatural being is a better explanation for the observable facts, endearingly oblivious of the irony.

And yet not a single science paper has ever concluded any such thing and the small handful of pseudo-scientists that the creation cult employs to misinform the world never publish in peer-reviewed science journals. It's almost exactly like science just gazes bemusedly at the hopeless flailings of creationism, which has been on the canvas now for 50 years but still hasn't noticed. The trick has been to remain completely oblivious of real science by never reading anything that might make them wonder if being horizontal on the canvas is the best way of winning a boxing match.

Meanwhile real scientists do real science and science moves on.

An example of this was a paper published recently in Science which is the result on an AI assisted detailed analysis of the genomes of 1,154 strains of the ancient, single-cell yeast, Saccaromycotina, to discover how the different yeasts had evolved. Nowhere in the paper is there the slightest hint that the process that produced the different strains might be magic, not natural evolution. Instead, the research provides more understanding of how the evolutionary processes work.

The research by a team co-led by Professor of Bioinformatics Abigail Leavitt LaBella of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is explained in a University of North Carolina news release:

Uninteligent Design - Bacteria Have A Defence Against The Viruses Designed To Infect Them

Bacterium infected by phage viruses

Illustration: Getty Images

Structural model at atomic resolution of bacteriophage T4

Dr. Victor Padilla-Sanchez, PhD via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Study details a common bacterial defense against viral infection

Creationism's latest hobbyhorse, designed by Michael J Behe to revive the flagging fortunes of his Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy and the abysmal failure of his Intelligent [sic] Design ploy to get creationism inserted into the US public school science curricula at US taxpayers' expense, is the silly notion of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution'.

This unintelligently designed strategy contains the seeds of its own failure at being regarded as a science because it starts off with the assumption that all species were created perfectly by a perfect creator, in compliance with Christian superstition, and so any mutation must be devolutionary away from that perfection. Mutations are called 'genetic entropy', so incorporating the idiotic notion that genetic 'information' is subject to the same law of physics as energy, so the Second Law of Thermodynamic make evolution impossible.

This is supposed to make creationists think Darwin must have been wrong because mutations can't improve fitness, being devolutionary, not evolutionary because of 'genetic entropy'. It ignores the fact that only an improvement in fitness in a given environment can produce more descendants than a deleterious mutation because fitness is defined as the ability to survive and reproduce. How increased fitness can be defined as a reduction in perfection is never explained because Behe 'forgot' to define 'perfection' leaving his marks to assume it means something made by their god.

And this daft notion is now cited by creationists to explain why an intelligent, omniscient and supposedly omnibenevolent god would design parasites. These are now explained as devolved from some initial perfection because of 'genetic entropy' made possible by Adam & Eve's 'sin' - Which is not religious superstition, because it was a historical fact! Got it!

So, we now have an explanation for bacteria, viruses and other parasites, that absolved creationism's god of any responsibility for them while blaming humans for their 'devolution'. However, the problem for this childish nonsense arises when we have parasites on those parasites, such as viruses that infect bacteria - how are bacteria responsible for Adam & Eve's sin and if they aren't why are they being punished for it?

Then it gets even more bizarre when we discover that many bacteria have mechanisms for protecting themselves from these viruses. How can 'devolution' produce an improvement in the organism's ability to survive and reproduce, and in what sense is an improvement a reduction in perfection?

Unintelligent Design - How the Periodic Cicadas Evolved

17-year cicada, Magicicada septendecim

Image: © Ed Reschke-Stone/Getty Images

13-year cicada, Magicada tridecima

Billions of cicadas are about to emerge from underground in a rare double-brood convergence

If it hasn't happened yet, it will do soon. The largest brood of 13-year locusts is about to emerge simultaneously with the mid-western brood of 17-year locusts - and even that only happens every 221 years.

The mathematically-minded will have noticed something about the periodicity of these insects - they are prime numbers (i.e. numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1) ad there is a very good evolutionary reason for this - it makes it harder for a potential predator to synchronise with these emergencies because, since there are no periods that would coincide exactly with these primes other than the prime itself and a 2, 3, 4 or more period would only coincide with an emergence of these cicadas every 26, 39 and 52 years respectively for the 13-year locust, longer for the 17-year locust.

Because these broods only emerge in the same year, they form an effectively isolated genetic population and yet these two broods appear to be identical in appearance, song and genetics, so it will be interesting to see how they interact, although they occupy different geographical areas, so overlap is relatively rare.

As a strategy to avoid predation, this takes some beating in terms of intelligent stupid design, but there is a nasty little twist to the story, as I will relate later...

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a creative commons license, John Cooley, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, USA and Chris Simon, Senior Research Scientist of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, USA explains the significance of this event from the point of view of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Their article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - How Ancient Symbiotic Relationships Drive Evolution - Naturally

Selection of lichens
symbiosis between cyanobacteria and fungi

Symbiotic relationship between clown fish and anemone.

Species living closely together in symbiosis is far older and way more common than you might think

Biologically, symbiotic relationships are alliances of genes that give the lie to creationist claims that 'selfish' genes are genes for selfishness. In fact, if it's in the interests of genes, and it usually is, genes form alliances that put the two species in the partnership on an evolutionary trajectory in which both species benefit from the evolution of one or the other in a process known as co-evolution.

When you understand this, you can find examples almost everywhere you look - think how many wild jungle fowl there would be today if they hadn't formed an alliance with humans to become the commonest bird on Earth - the domestic hen. The same goes for sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, cats and dogs. The 'selfish' genes are of course, unconcerned about the ultimate fate of their carriers, hence the term 'selfish'; the only thing that matters is how many of them there are in the world, and there are unarguably now more human and more of our domestic animals’ genes in the world than when they were wild animals and we were hunter-gatherers.

And, when you look inside a complex cell, you see more examples of symbiosis - several cell organelles such as mitochondria and (in plants) chloroplasts, are really bacteria in symbiotic association with the cell.

Our gut microbes, and the often-unique gut microbes of other species such as cockroaches, are locked in a symbiotic co-evolution from which neither can escape because to do so would lose the benefit of mutuality.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne, explains how symbiotic relationships are commonplace in nature and have shaped evolution. His article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Design News - The Superbug, Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff), May Be Developing Resistance to Vancomycin - Design or Evolution?

Clostridium difficile (C. diff)

Treatment for Deadly Superbug C. diff May Be Weakening - University of Houston

The latest rabbit hole Michael J Behe has driven the creation cult into is the daft notion of 'Genetic Entropy'. This was introduced following the failure of the Discovery Institute to trick the courts in the USA into declaring that 'Intelligent [sic] Design' is real science and so should be foist on impressionable children in science class at taxpayers’ expense.

The notion of 'Genetic Entropy' plays on what used to be presented as an anti-evolution argument - the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that a closed system tends to disorder (increased entropy), so evolution can't increase order and complexity. This ignores the fact that Earth is not a closed system, of course, and relies on the scientific illiteracy of its target marks. And it looks nice and sciencey - something that creationists all crave while purporting to reject science.

So, Genetic Entropy starts off with the assumption that every species was created perfect and then, because Adam and Eve allowed 'Sin' to enter the world, these 'perfect' genes have been getting progressively less perfect. Now, this isn't Bible literalism, obviously, because that would make 'Genetic Entropy' religion, not science! Got it!

I posted this in an Evolution Vs Creation Facebook group. Creationists appear to be pretending not to have seen it.

The problem then is, how can increasing 'entropy' lead to greater fitness in a given environment? It can't of course because unlike the random process of mutation, there is no selective element which can produce more descendants from a worse genome, and unless it is getting worse, in what possible sense of the word can it be getting less perfect?

So, faced with something like increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, creationists in Michael J Behe's latest rabbit hole have only two ways to go. They can't argue that increased entropy is leading to an improved genome (from the perspective of the bacterium) because that would mean 'genetic entropy' is leading towards greater perfection. That then leaves them with the unenviable choice of design or evolution, and for design, read 'malevolence' because increasing antibiotic resistance increases the ability of the bacterium to make us sick, and any omniscient designer would know that.

IOW, Michael J Behe's attempt to resuscitate the Discovery Institute's flagging 'Wedge Strategy' has resulted in his fundamentalist cult having to choose between the twin 'evils' of blasphemy or evolution!

The latest twist in the evolutionary arms race between bacteria and human medical science is in the increasing weakness of the antibiotic of choice for Clostridium difficile (C. diff), vancomycin, against which C. diff appears to be developing resistance. This was discovered by researchers at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy, Texas, USA, who have just published their findings in the Journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, sadly behind a paywall with only the abstract available. However, their work is described in a University of Houston news release:

Unintelligent Design - Rotten Tomato For The Bumbling Designer - Or How To Create Unnecessary Complexity

Left three images: close-ups of tomato trichomes where acylsugars are produced. These sticky chemicals act as natural flypaper for potential pests. On the right: a close-up of tomato plant roots covered in small hairs.

Credit: Rachel Kerwin

Uncovering a ‘parallel universe’ in tomato genetics

Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer, unlike a normal intelligent designer worthy of the name, seems to have a moto:

"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing twice, in two different ways".

However, even for someone familiar with all the different ways creationism's putative designer has designed for doing the same thing - flight, swimming, body-plan, respiratory systems and eyes, to name but a few - and the regularity with which its 'designs' turn out to be the opposite of what an intelligent designer would design, it will come as no surprise that it has managed to surpass itself with the design of two different metabolic pathways for doing the same thing in the same plant!

Scientists at Michigan State University, Robert Last, have discovered that tomato plant roots produce defensive sugars - acylsugars - by two different metabolic pathways.

And, as an added embarrassment for the creation cult, they have shown that these two pathways came about as a result of new genetic information arising by accidental gene duplication almost 17 million years before they believe Earth existed.

Acylsugars are a class of very sticky sugars produced in specialized cells in the tip of the tricomes of plants of the tomato (Solanaceae) family, which includes aubergines, potatoes, nightshades, peppers and tobacco. Their purpose appears to be to act as a sort of natural flypaper. However, they are also found in the roots of tomato plants, but the root acylsugars are different enough from the tricome acylsugars to almost warrant a separate class of sugars.

It was while investigating the reason for this difference that the Michigan State University team discovered what they termed a 'parallel universe' of metabolic pathways and the genes that control them. They discovered that if you knock out the genes for making root acylsugars, this doesn't affect their production in the tricomes and if you knock out the genes that control the tricome production, acysugars are still produced in the roots.
The team’s findings are the subject of an open access paper published recently in Science Advances. They also explain the background to the study in a Michigan State University news release:

Unintelligent Design - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Taken Leave Of Its Senses?

An amoeba cell infected by Naegleriavirus. The fluorescence microscopy image shows the viral factory and newly produced virus particles (in blue) within the amoeba cell (pink).

Patrick Arthofer and Florian Panhölzl.

Illustration of Naegleriavirus based on electron microscopy. A section through a virus particle with the star-shaped stargate is shown.

Credit: Stefan Pommer / photopic.at (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Giant Viruses Infect Deadly Parasite

Judging by the findings of scientists led by Patrick Arthofer and Matthias Horn from the University of Vienna's Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CeMESS), creationism's divine malevolence may have gone entirely round the twist and got carried away with its success with parasites.

Not only has it created parasites, apparently to increase the suffering in the world, but it's now creating parasites for those parasites! Kindly creationists who have realised blaming another creator such as 'Sin' for parasites is a blasphemy, might be tempted to credit their beloved pestilential malevolence with trying to combat the parasites like the single-celled organism, Naegleria fowleri, that are causing such misery by attacking them with another parasite. But that makes no sense in terms of an omniscient, omnipotent creator god who, if such a god existed, could simply destroy Naegleria fowleri and have done with it.

The only thing that makes sense, if you believe the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible man is that it has become obsessed with creating parasites for the sake of creating parasites.

What the Vienna team have discovered is that the serious pathogen, Naegleria fowleri, is parasitised by a giant virus, named Naegleriavirus. Giant viruses are unusually large viruses with a complex genome.

Naegleria fowleri is an especially nasty little amoeba that I described in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good:

Unintelligent Design - The Brilliant Way Bacteria Evade Our Immune System - Malevolent Design or Incompetent Designer?

Burkholderia thailandensis (purple) uses cellular components (yellow) to form membrane protrusions from one host cell to another (green).

Burkholderia pseudomallei, a Gram-negative rod, straight or slightly curved, with bipolar staining

The enemy within: How pathogens spread unrecognized in the body - Biozentrum

Here's a conundrum for intelligent [sic] design creationists. Scientists working at Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland with colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore, have discovered how the bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei that causes the serious tropical disease, melioidosis, manages to evade our immune systems to make us sick.

What information do you have on the origins of the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei and what it causes in humans? Burkholderia pseudomallei is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes melioidosis, a potentially fatal infectious disease primarily found in Southeast Asia and Northern Australia. The bacterium is commonly found in soil and water in endemic regions. It was first identified by Alfred Whitmore and C.S. Krishnaswami in 1912 in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). The name "melioidosis" is derived from the Greek word "melis," meaning "distemper of asses," as the disease was initially identified in horses. B. pseudomallei can infect humans and a wide range of animals through various routes, including inhalation, ingestion, or through breaks in the skin. In humans, it can cause a spectrum of symptoms ranging from localized skin abscesses and fever to more severe forms of pneumonia, septicemia (bloodstream infection), and multiple organ abscesses. Melioidosis can be challenging to diagnose due to its diverse clinical manifestations and can mimic other diseases, making it important for clinicians in endemic areas to consider it when evaluating patients with febrile illnesses. Treatment of melioidosis typically involves prolonged antibiotic therapy with drugs such as ceftazidime, meropenem, or imipenem, followed by oral antibiotics such as trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole to prevent relapse. However, antibiotic resistance in B. pseudomallei is a growing concern, particularly in regions where the disease is endemic. Prevention strategies include avoiding contact with contaminated soil and water, wearing protective clothing during outdoor activities, and practicing good wound care.

The conundrum is, was this malevolently designed or is it the result if incompetent design?

The problem for creationists is that they believe the human immune system was intelligently designed to protect us from the bacteria and other organisms their putative designer god had designed to make us sick, and yet not only does it not work as intended but many of the harmful parasites from which we suffer seem to have been designed to avoid our immune system, some of them by ingenious ways, like the bacterium in question, B. pseudomallei.

It's hard to reconcile the difference between a designer who can't design a functional immune system and one who is genius enough to design some of the extremely clever and sophisticated mechanisms for evading our immune system. The idea that these could be one and the same entity is almost laughable unless the answer is that the inadequate immune system and the ingeniously designed parasites are all part of the same malevolent plan to make us sick.

What B. pseudomallei does to avoid being detected by the immune system, once it gets inside a cell, is cause the cell to make special tubes connected to other cells, through which it can pass without going outside the cell again, where it would be recognised as a pathogen. In this way it spreads throughout a tissue without the victim's immune system even being aware of it.

The research team have published their findings, in the open access, online Cell Press journal, Cell Host & Microbe and explain it in a press release from The University of Basel, Biozentrum: