Malevolent Designer News - How HIV Research is Trying to Overcome the "Designer's" Devilish Malevolence

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)

Pinpointing HIV immune response

The traditional creationist double-think response, when presented with evidence of malevolent design in the form of parasites such as pathological viruses, bacteria, protozoa or worms, etc., is to blame something called 'Sin' for their creation, absolving their proclaimed intelligent [sic] designer of any culpability, while maintaining that everything living must be attributed to their god because it is the only entity capable of designing living organisms.

However, in the case of HIV, the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in humans, they greeted it with barely concealed jubilation in their caring Christian way, declaring it to be a 'Gay Plague' sent by their god to punish homosexuals, so they now can't blame Satan or 'Sin' for its creation. A case of being hoist by their own petard.

And to add to creationists' embarrassment, they also believe the human immune system that HIV evades then suppresses, was designed by their, allegedly perfect, omniscient designer to protect us from the parasites it created to harm or kill us, in which case, HIV, like so many other pathogens, is a testament to its incompetence.

HIV is one of a group of RNA retroviruses that can hide from our immune system by inserting a DNA version of their RNA into our DNA using the enzyme reverse transcriptase that they bring with them. Once inserted, the virus looks for all the world like just another chunk of junk DNA. Indeed, like most species, our DNA contains lots of mutated and harmless relics of these retrovirus from our evolutionary history.

Now though, medical science, in trying to do what seems beyond the capability of creationism's putative omnipotent intelligent [sic] designer is closing in on just how HIV manages to evade and suppress our immune system, and how our immune system responds to it.

In a paper just published open access in the journal Science Communications a team of scientists led by Ruy M. Ribeiro, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA has shown, using experiments on Macaque monkeys and mathematical modelling, that, although the body's immune system does succeed in suppressing virus production and in killing infected cells, the response only last for a very short time at the start of infection.

Malevolent Designer News - How Science is Racing to Beat Creationism's Favourite Sadist

Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein

Black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis
Illustration from The Malevolent Designer

Catherine Webber-Hounslow

Racing to defuse a ‘ticking’ public health time bomb | YaleNews

Like the parasitic worms that zombify their hosts I wrote about in my previous blog post, I also wrote about the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, now proliferating in North America and infecting more and more victims with Lyme Disease, in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

As the reputed work of an intelligent [sic] designer, this tick can only be regarded as evidence of the pestilential malevolent of any designer that could design such a creature, as it serves no purpose other than to be the vector of a number of different pathogens and to make more ticks.

Creationism in Crisis - How Science is Fighting Creationism's Divine Malevolence With Nobel Prize-Winning Science

Katalin Karikó (right) and Drew Weissman, the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries enabling the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines

Peggy Peterson Photography
Penn Medicine / Via Reuters

Nobel prize in medicine awarded to mRNA pioneers – here's how their discovery was integral to COVID vaccine development

Of course, no serious biologist things they are fighting and invisible magic creator in the sky who is actively designing parasites to harm us, or designing anything else, for that matter, but creationists believe that's just what they are doing.

Some even go so far as claiming scientists, together with their technical staff and publishers, are all part of a secret Satanic conspiracy to mislead people about what their god has created, including the parasites and the suffering and misery they cause, apparently.

So, this piece of research must come across to genuine creationists who really do believe what their cult mandates them to believe, as scientists waging a war on their god's creation.

The war, of course, is a war that medical science has always waged against suffering and the causes of suffering, because increasing the sum total of happiness, but reducing the unhappiness in the world, is basic humanist morality - something that would appear to be lacking in creationists' putative intelligent [sic] designer.

A particularly successful recent war was the war against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic still raging throughout the world, but thanks to the success of medical science, in a much less virulent form, most people having been protected by the mRNA vaccine developed by Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania and a massive world-wide effort to find a vaccine.

First a little about mRNA vaccines:

Creationism in Crisis - How The Malevolent Designer Kills Mother & Child During Pregnancy

Human placental tissue sections with immunofluorescence - cis P-tau (green),
trans P-tau (green), and ProteoStat (red).

Jash, S; Banerjee, S; Cheng, S., et al (2023)

Western News - In major breakthrough, Western, Brown researchers close in on preeclampsia cure

In a major breakthrough, scientists have identified the cause of preeclampsia, the leading cause of mortality during pregnancy.

And once again a scientific breakthrough exposes the utter nonsense that is intelligent [sic] design creationism.

Preeclampsia affects up to 8% of women during pregnancy. If left untreated it can lead to eclampsia (an epileptiform fit) in the later stages of pregnancy, which can result in the death of both mother and baby.

Malevolent Designer News - How A Deadly Superbug Is 'Designed' To Make Us Sick

Staphylococcus aureus

CDC

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria being engulfed by an immune cell known as a neutrophil.

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

Researchers discover genes behind antibiotic resistance in deadly superbug infections | Doherty Website

Scientists based at the Docherty Institute, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia have discovered just how devious any designer of the deadly super bug, Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Golden staph, would need to have been to come up with such a clever way to make us sick and die.

Curiously, for people who purport to worship the putative designer of all living things, creationists would have us believe that the designer is just such a mendacious malevolence, rather than have us believe that a natural process such as evolution by natural selection is responsible for parasites and the way they evade our immune systems - also, so creationists claim, designed by the same designer, making it look like a bumbling incompetent amnesiac than a supremely intelligent deity.

First, a brief background on S. aureus and MRSA:

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Divine Malevolence Planning the Next Pandemic?

News - Bird flu is undergoing changes that could increase the risk of widespread human transmission - University of Nottingham

On top of a couple of recent papers showing creationist dogma to be false and that, if there were such a thing as an intelligent designer of living things, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent monster, we have another paper which, if we believe creationist dogma, again shows their divine creator to be an obsessive, sadistic psychopath.

It is the news that scientists at Nottingham University, UK., and China have discovered how the variant of the H3N8 avian flu virus which is endemic in Chinese poultry farms, is mutating in a way which could make it more likely to cross the species barrier into humans and become the next pandemic.

What is the H3N8 Avian influenza virus and what threat does it pose to humanity?

H3N8 Avian influenza, also known as avian flu or bird flu, is a subtype of the influenza A virus that primarily affects birds, especially waterfowl and shorebirds. It is one of several subtypes of avian influenza viruses, each identified by specific combinations of surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). In the case of H3N8, it refers to the third type of hemagglutinin (H3) and the eighth type of neuraminidase (N8) found on the virus's surface.

While H3N8 avian influenza primarily affects birds, it has the potential to pose a threat to humans under certain circumstances. Here are some key points to consider regarding its potential threat to humanity:

1. Zoonotic Transmission: Avian influenza viruses, including H3N8, are zoonotic, which means they can infect humans when they come into close contact with infected birds or contaminated environments. Most human cases of avian influenza have resulted from direct or indirect exposure to infected poultry.
2. Limited Human Infections: H3N8 avian influenza has not been as widely reported in human infections as some other avian influenza subtypes, such as H5N1 and H7N9. However, there have been occasional cases of H3N8 avian influenza infection in humans, often associated with direct contact with infected birds.
3. Potential for Adaptation: Avian influenza viruses have the ability to mutate and potentially adapt to human hosts. If a strain of H3N8 were to acquire the ability for efficient human-to-human transmission, it could lead to a more widespread outbreak or even a pandemic. This is a significant concern with avian influenza viruses in general.
4. Influenza Pandemic Preparedness: Due to the risk of avian influenza strains causing pandemics, public health organizations and governments worldwide monitor and study these viruses closely. Preparedness plans and strategies are in place to respond quickly to potential outbreaks, including the development of vaccines and antiviral medications.
5. Importance of Surveillance: Surveillance of avian influenza in both bird populations and humans is crucial to detect any changes in the virus's behavior or its potential to infect humans more easily. Timely identification and containment of outbreaks are essential to minimize the risk to public health.

In summary, H3N8 avian influenza is primarily a bird virus, but it can infect humans in rare cases. The main threat it poses to humanity lies in its potential to evolve and adapt to human-to-human transmission, potentially leading to a wider outbreak or pandemic. Vigilant surveillance, early detection, and preparedness are key components in mitigating this threat and preventing a significant public health crisis.

As explained in a Nottingham University news release, the evidence comes from an isolate of the H3N8 avian influenza virus (AIV) recovered from a human patient:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite 'Designer' Made Alzheimers More Likely

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

IU researchers identify new gene mutation that alters Alzheimer’s disease risk

The terrible week for creationism continues unabated: Following yesterday’s news of more evidence of common descent of the great apes, including humans, we have news that creationism's putative designer has apparently given some people a gene variant that increases their risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia in later life, while some others get a variant the reduces that risk.

A problem of creationists' own making is the insistence that mutations don't happen by chance but need the deliberate intervention of their favourite putative designer, without whom nothing happens.

This means they need to ignore the existence of parasites, which, if they were designed deliberately, can only be regarded as evidence that whatever designed them had malevolent intent, and intended to increase the suffering in the world, since that is what they do.

It also means they need to ignore the evidence that a lot of diseases are caused by mutations, especially the degenerative diseases in older people, which don't manifest until after they have produced their offspring, and so passed on their genetics, including any mutations.

This is where we come to the news that a large team of researchers, led by scientists from Indiana University School of Medicine, USA, have identified a mutation in a critical gene for the brain's immune system, so greatly increasing the risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Favourite Malevolence's Top 5 Deadliest Pandemics

While I'm sitting here slowly recovering from COVID-19 which my partner and I probably either picked up in France or during the flight home, I thought I would look at some of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer's other successes with lethal pandemics, so I asked my AI app for the 5 deadliest pandemics from known history.

It should be noted that the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is far from over, has to date produced 768,983,095 cases with 6,953,743 deaths and is still producing 352,943 new cases every week (WHO figures as at 2 August, 2023) This despite the fact that 13,492,099,754 (13.5 billion) vaccine doses have been administered.

Given the high mortality rate of in the early months of the pandemic, imagine what the death toll would have been without the assistance of science! Earlier pandemics had no such benefits so direct comparisons are meaningless.

A survey published in The Lancet in June 2022 estimated that about 20 million deaths from COVID-19 had been prevented in the first year following COVID-19 vaccination, so human medical science has deprived the malevolent designer of an even more stunning success with its SARS-CoV-2 virus. If it had occurred a century earlier, it would have ranked about 2 or 3 in the pandemic deaths league table - up there with the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.

Now for the top 5 pandemics:

Way out in the lead we have the Black Death or Bubonic plague, with 72-200 million deaths.

Please note that my knowledge is based on information available up to September 2021. These references provide more detailed information about each pandemic and their impacts. Additionally, there have been other significant pandemics throughout history, but these five are among the deadliest. [ChatGPT3]

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Favourite Sadist Obsessed With Making us Sick?

Like a multifunctional gardening tool, the T4A pili of different Acinetobacter strains have evolutionarily modified the ComC protein at their tip (oval, in different colors) to settle in different niches within humans.

Gray bars: cell envelope.

© MPI-DS / LMP

How the hospital pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii quickly adapts to new environmental conditions | Aktuelles aus der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Model of the type IVa pilus (T4aP) in A. baylyi. OM–Outer membrane; IM–Inner membrane; PG–peptidoglycan. The individual components are listed in Table 1.

From: Iruegas R, Pfefferle K, Göttig S, Averhoff B, Ebersberger I (2023)

Remember how Michael J Behe got an entire book out of the fact that his target readership thought ignorant incredulity was scientific data, so the fact that neither he nor they knew how the bacterial flagellums evolved was presented as evidence that a god must have designed it? His book is still one of the central gospels of the creationist cult, even though few members would be capable of reading and understanding it, let alone be prepared to read the detailed rebuttals by Miller and others.

In fact, the evolution of the bacterial flagellum by exaptation of pre-existing structures, namely the Type III secretory system that bacteria use to anchor themselves to target cells before parasitizing them, was known about before he wrote his book, as Kenneth Miller has pointed out - a fact that Behe has failed to acknowledge in subsequent editions.

Creatinism in Crisis - When Were Humans Given an Immune System?

Viruses in circulation

What happens in our body when we encounter and fight off a virus like the flu, SARS-CoV-2 or RSV?

Having tested positive for COVID-19, I thought I would spend a little time finding out more about what's going on inside my body right now.

But the research has collided with the work I normally do in exposing the absurdity of creationism in all its guises and the futility of trying to force-fit real world evidence into origin myths made up by people from the fearful infancy of our species who thought Earth was just a small flat disc with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centered on the Canaanite Hills where they hearded their goats, told their camp-fire tales of magic sky-gods and imagined it was all made just for them.

What occurred to me is the problem creationists would have if they knew enough about the subject and weren't too afraid to question their cult dogmas. For example: The standard creationist excuse for all the nasty little parasites such as viruses, bacteria, etc., is that they are the result of 'sin' which entered the world because of 'The Fall' (so betraying the fact that creationism isn't the science their cult leaders pretend, but religious superstition after all).

It always amuses me how cult leaders like Michael J. Behe make a big issue of the 'irreducible complexity' of bacteria such as E coli as evidence that creationism putative designer must have designed them, only to have them dismissed on another day in a different argument, as the creation of another 'evil' entity - 'sin'.

But with creationism, the tactic is to use whichever argument will work on the current audience, regardless of if consistence of intellectual integrity.

Incidentally, blaming 'sin' flatly contradicts the claim in the Bible that God told Isaiah that He created evil because he created everything.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)

So, either God lied to Isaiah or Isaiah lied in the Bible - or creationist cult leaders are lying to their cult.

But let's forget that bit of Bible awkwardness and think things through a little more:

Humans were allegedly created before 'The Fall' so would have had no need for an immune system, which is our defense, imperfect though it is, against the parasites 'sin' created after 'The Fall'.

So, were we given an immune system after 'The Fall'? There is no mention of a major redesign in the Bible, but wouldn't it have been simpler for the creator to have forgiven Adam and Eve and stopped 'sin' creating these things in the first place? And of course, most multicellular species also have an immune system which wasn't needed before 'The Fall'.

Or, if he was really going to need to have himself sacrificed later in a blood offering first why did he wait several thousand years? Why couldn't he impregnate Eve, have Adam do the dirty deed and solve the problem there and then?

Or did he omnisciently anticipate what would happen and design immune systems for the (future) parasites right from the start? If so, he must have anticipated 'The Fall' and the creative powers of 'sin', including details of what it would create, and being omnipotent, could have stopped it.

Anyway, those are just a few of the many problems that creationism causes for itself by trying to fit reality into such an absurd myth, like trying to ram a large square peg into a small round hole, without changing its shape in any way.

Here then is the account of how our immune system tries, often unsuccessfully because it isn't very efficient, to cope when an infection enters our body. It is an article from The Conversation by Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, and Wesley Freppel, Research Fellow, Institute for Glycomics, both of Griffith University, Australia. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Designer News - Dandruff - Another Anoying Little Gift From Creationism's Beloved Malevolence

Up to Half of all adults will have it

Shutterstock

Scanning Electron Microscope picture of freshly prepared human dandruff sample.

Credit: Horoporo via Wikipedia
CC BY-SA 3.0

What is dandruff? How do I get rid of it? Why does it keep coming back?

Dandruff is caused by a yeast of the Malassezia family, Malassezia globosa to be precise. As a complex, eukaryote cell, creationists superstition insists that it must have been designed by an intelligent [sic] designer. It is also axiomatic in creationism that the only entity capable of designing living organisms is the omnipotent, omniscience god of the Bible, Torah and Quran.

It follows from that then, if we accept the dogma for the sake of argument, that this designer god knew precisely what Malassezia globosa would do and so designed it for that purpose.

And that purpose, apart from making more copies of Malassezia globosa, is to cause the embarrassing condition in humans, dandruff. Dandruff doesn't cause a general illness or handicap (apart maybe from a social handicap), and it isn't even painful, apart from an irritation or itch that needs constant scratching. In fact, inducing the person with dandruff to scratch their scalp a lot is Malassezia globosa's dispersal strategy.

Here is what AI's ChatGPT has to say about it:

Malevolent Designer News - Why Creationism's Favourite Sadist Gave Some People Protection From COVID-19 - If You Believe That Superstitious Nonsense

Gene Mutation May Explain Why Some Don’t Get Sick from COVID-19 | UC San Francisco

The thing about being a follower of the intelligent [sic] design cult is that you have to believe whatever the 'design' is, that was precisely what your putative intelligent [sic] designer intended to design because, although you should never say so, your designer god is one and the same god that fundamentalist Christians and Moslems believe in, i.e., it is omniscient, omnipotent and inerrant so is incapable of making a mistake.

So, what the cult now has to explain is why their favorite sadist gave some people a gene which protects then against symptomatic COVID-19, but not everyone, if, as the normal excuse for these parasites is valid - i.e., it wasn't God, it was something called 'sin' which creates viruses (and apparently the supreme, omniscient ruler of the universe is powerless to stop it or uncaring enough to not bother, or maybe even unaware of it).

In which case, why create the protective gene?

Of course, a ready explanation which fits in with the intelligent [sic] design superstition is that it wanted a few people to catch COVID-19 but not know they has=d it, so they could spread it around - the infectious but asymptomatic cases that are believed to have been responsible for a great deal of the pandemic's success.

So, creationists need to explain whether their intelligent [sic] designer deliberately created these super-spreaders to infect as many people as possible and if not, what did it create them for and how come it didn't know what the outcome would be? The discovery of this gene was made by a group led by researchers from the University of California San Francisco, who have just published their findings, open access, in Nature. As the UC San Francisco news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationisms Putative Designer is Hiding its New Improved Version of SARS-CoV-2 for Later.

The U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, has widely spread within the U.S. white-tailed deer population, possibly transmitted from humans to deer, where it mutated and potentially transmitted back to humans. The findings are part of a study involving the surveillance of over 11,000 white-tailed deer.

“Reservoir Species” – USDA Releases Shocking Research on COVID-19 Transmission Between White-Tailed Deer and Humans

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
in 2022, 12.2% were carrying the virus and 31% showed signs of previous exposure.

If you're a malevolent designer and you just had a major triumph with a nasty little virus that killed millions, made many more times that sick, and wrecked economies worldwide, but the human victims hit back with a vaccine that protects them, what do you do?

We'll, if you're creationism's favourite sadist, you don't just give up and allow your victims to win; you have a long-term plan to teach the upstarts a lesson.

Using the fact that immunity to your virus is short-lived because you designed their immune systems that way, you store your nasty little virus away somewhere where there is no vaccine-induced immunity and you can experiment with better, more deadly and more infectious versions of it and wait until your human victims no longer have enough immunity to resist the new, improved, version, then you transfer it back into the human population and sit back to enjoy the suffering again!

And what better than a wild species that humans regularly hunt for food, but which don't need to meet the food-hygiene regulations with which humans normally protect themselves from infections in domesticated species.

In China, this could be practically any species, but in North America, what better species is there than the white-tailed deer, which is regularly hunted for meat?

This, of course, is the sort of thinking an honest, troobuleeving creationist (if there is such a thing) would have to believe, because the evidence is that white tailed deer are a reservoir species harbouring the SARS-CoV-2 and providing an environment in which to mutate and evolve.

This evidence comes from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) which has just released the results of its first year of sampling white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for active infection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These studies show that SARS-CoV-2 is likely to have spread widely within the U.S. white-tailed deer population.
According to a USDA APHIS news item:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks are Designed to Infect Deer With a Prion Disease

A wildlife camera captures deer practicing allogrooming — grooming one another to get places that they can’t reach on their own. During allogrooming, deer may eat ticks that contain CWD-infested blood.

Ticks may be able to spread chronic wasting disease between deer

White-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus
May catch fatal Chronic Wasting Disease from tics

Source: USDA Via Wikipedia
Public Domain

Black-legged or Deer tick,
Ixodes scapularis

Source: USDA via Wikipedia
Public Domain

The thing about being a troobuleeving creationist is that you have to find a way to avoid crediting your putative intelligent [sic] designer deity with all the nasties that exist in nature, while insisting that only your beloved intelligent [sic] designer designed everything.

You also need to buleeve your putative designer is omniscient because it's one and the same as the allegedly omniscient and omnipotent god of the Bible and Qur'an, so knows exactly what its designs will do when it designs them, which amounts to designing them for that purpose.

The same deity is also allegedly omni-benevolent, which makes parasites and prey-predator arms races difficult to explain, especially since it supposedly boasted to Isaiah about creating evil, so the Bible claims (Isaiah 45:7).

So, imagine the mental gymnastics that a troobuleeving creationist will need to perform to accommodate the knowledge that one of their intelligent [sic] designer's designs, the black-legged or deer tick, Ixodes scapularis, might be responsible for transmitting the prion that causes Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer, as this piece of research, led by Heather Inzalaco of the Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, suggests.

The black-legged tick and how it transmits the rickettsia parasite, Anaplasma phagocytophilum to humans - The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is Not Good pp. 15-17.

First, a little about prions and the diseases they cause:

Malevolent Designer News - How Food Poisoning Must Look Intelligently Designed to a Creationist

Scanning electron micrograph of Providencia alcalifaciens

Source: Wikipedia (Public domain)

Providencia alcalifaciens growing on culture medium

New insights on bacteria that causes food poisoning | Osaka Metropolitan University

The thing about believing in intelligent design, if that's what Christian and Islamic creationists genuinely do, is that you have to believe the bad stuff is designed by the designer of the good stuff because your religion only allows you to believe in one supreme designer, or you have to believe there is some other entity or force capable of intelligently designing things against which your putative supreme designer is powerless.

The other entity or force is capable of altering your supreme designer's plans at will and there is not a thing the supreme designer can do about it. Even the bizarre and morally repugnant blood sacrifice of its own son didn't give it sufficient power to overcome this rival designer, apparently.

The logic then of insisting there is only one intelligent designer is that the same designer that designs parasites that make us sick, designed our immune system to protect us from its malevolent designs. It needs a private definition of the word 'intelligent' to define that as intelligent design.

As this latest piece of research shows, some bacteria, in this case those that cause food poisoning not only have genes that produce the toxins that make us sick have also been designed to share these genes even with other species, and creationists dogma dictates that creationists believe this can't have evolved by a mindless process, so must be the design by ab intelligence that can only be described as malevolent.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan, with colleagues from the School of Environment and Life Sciences, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB), Bashundhara, Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Department of Pediatrics, Mizushima Central Hospital, Okayama, Japan.

The work is explained in a brief press release from Osaka Metropolitan University:

Creationism in Crisis - Rogue Mitochondrial DNA - Malevolent Intelligence, Incompetence or Mindless Evolution?

Creationism in Crisis

Rogue Mitochondrial DNA - Malevolent Intelligence, Incompetence or Mindless Evolution?

Mitochondria surrounded by cytoplasm

Credit: Dr David Furness

Transmission em image of mitochondria

© H. Jastrow.

New route to evolution: how DNA from our mitochondria gets into our genomes | University of Cambridge

So often, if only they hadn't learned to ignore it like an elephant in the room, or stay carefully ignorant of it, creationists should be confronting evidence that, if they believe it was designed, could only have been designed by a malevolent or incompetent designer.

Take for example this discovery that sections of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) frequently (in about 1 in 4,000 births) cross into the nuclear DNA, where it can cause cancer.

Creationists insist that this must have been intelligently designed by an omniscient designer who would therefore have known the outcome of its designed processes. The presence of mitochondria in cells is of course, good evidence of how simple, prokaryote cells, evolved into more complex, eukaryote cells by endosymbiosis - something creationists insist didn’t happen, so they are already an acute embarrassment for creationists. Now we have this finding that a supposed intelligent design process would look like a design to cause cancer.
This was discovered recently by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. The team were investigating a 2018 claim by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in the USA, that there were occasional instances of inheritance of paternal mtDNA, in contradiction to the normally accepted view that mtDNA in inherited exclusively from the maternal line because the sperm head, which fertilizes the egg does not contain any mitochondria.

The Cambridge/London team found that these were in fact examples of the migration of sections of mtDNA into the cell nucleus where they had become incorporated into the nuclear DNA. The process is in theory a two-way process except for two things:

1. There is only one nucleus with two copies of the DNA, but a cell can contain thousands of mitochondria, each with a copy of its DNA so the odds are greatly in favour of sections of mtDNA becoming free-roaming.
2. The nuclear membrane has pores which allow RNA to pass out into the cell, whereas the mitochondrial membrane is an intact barrier through which DNA or RNA can't normally pass.

The scientists’ findings are explained in a Cambridge University press release:

Creationism in Crisis - 'Viking Disease' was Inherited From Neanderthals As Eurasian Humans Evolved by Hybridization

Creationism in Crisis

'Viking Disease' was Inherited From Neanderthals As Eurasian Humans Evolved by Hybridization

Dupuytren's contracture

The Viking disease can be due to gene variants inherited from Neanderthals | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

As scientists continue to use the Theory of Evolution to explain the observable facts, oblivious to creationist claims that they are about to abandon it in favour of the childish creationist superstition involving an unevidenced magic supernatural magician, a research team led by Hugo Zeberg from Karolinska Institutet and Nobel laureate, Svante Pääbo from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have shown that Dupuytren's contracture is probably caused by genes inherited from Neanderthals.

Dupuytren's contracture, also called 'Viking disease' because it is relatively common in North European men with over 30% of males over the age of 60 developing the condition, is a painless but debilitating condition in which one or more fingers is bent across the palm and locked in position.

The researchers were investigating genetic risk factors for the condition and analysed the DNA of a large cohort from UK, Finland and USA so could compare the DNA of 7,871 sufferers and 645,880 healthy controls. Three of the 61 risk factors were in genes inherited from Neanderthals and two of these were the second and third most important risk factors.

The team have published their findings in an open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

A news release from Karolinska Institutet explains the research:

Unintelligent Design - How Badly Designed DNA Replication can Cause Cancer - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Tiny circles of DNA (small rings) upend conventional genetic principles that govern inheritance of genes on chromosomes (oblongs). The large blue circles are cell nuclei.

Paul Mischel lab

Extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), DNA circles carrying cancer-associated genes, play a critical role in cancer development, according to new research led by Stanford Medicine. These DNA circles can be found in precancerous cells, and their presence accelerates the transformation to a cancerous state. This discovery paves the way for potential early diagnosis and intervention methods in cancer treatment.

Tiny DNA circles are key drivers of cancer, Stanford Medicine-led international study finds | News Center | Stanford Medicine

Here's a conundrum for creationists to avoid or blame on 'The Fall' - so showing creationism is Christian fundamentalism, not science.

It's the finding by scientists at Stanford Medical Centre, that errors in DNA replication can cause small circles of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) to form and that these can lead to the formation of cancers. ecDNAs have been found before and the suggestion was that they are produced by cancerous cells as the DNA replication becomes increasingly botched, but this new study shows they can arise in pre-cancerous cells and may well be the cause of the cell becoming cancerous.

The ecDNA contains genes that deliver a super-charged growth signal that can override a cell’s natural programming. They also contain genes likely to dampen the immune system’s response to a nascent cancer.

Creationists, of course, insist that the process of DNA replication was designed by their putative intelligent [sic] omniscient designer. An intelligent, omniscient designer will know in advance exactly what it's design will do, so this raises several questions:

1. If this was the work of an intelligent designer, why should it not be regarded as malevolent and responsible for designing a process that deliberately causes cancers and so increases the suffering in the world?
2. If this was not the intended outcome, why should the designer not be regarded an incompetent?
3. If it was incompetent, why didn't it change its design once it realised what the outcome was? Is it either ignorant of what its design does, or doesn't it care?

Anyway, those are problems for advocates of the childish notion of design by a magic, supernatural magician, believed by those who want easy answers and the pretense of superior knowledge to that of scientists, while avoiding the bother of learning.

The problem for science is how to use this knowledge to reduce the pain and suffering in the world, because medical science, unlike creationism's supposed god is actually moral and seeks to reduce the pain and suffering in the world, and so fights a continuous battle with whatever force is tending to increase it - in this case, as any intelligent person can understand, the force is that of evolutionary arms races and the self-interest of mindless genes.

So, how did the Stanford Medical School scientists make this discovery? The Stanford Medical news release by Krista Conger, explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

Malevolent Designer News

How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.

Credit: Ya’akov Billig

Early toilets reveal dysentery in Old Testament Jerusalem | University of Cambridge

Giardia duodenalis

Any caring, omni-benevolent, omniscient god would have warned his chosen people about the need for good hygiene in the form of sanitation and the importance of hand-washing, because it would have told them about germ theory and how to avoid catching the parasites it had designed to cause, amongst other things, debilitating diarrhoea.

But not so the god of the Old Testament.

The evidence just discovered by scientists working at Cambridge University, in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority, is that a particularly nasty parasite, Giardia duodenalis, which causes an intractable form of dysentery, was rife in Iron Age Judah.

There is, of course, no mention of this in the Bible, not any hint about how to avoid it with good hygiene and sanitation. It's just like the authors of the Bible were as ignorant as the Late Bronze age/Early Iron age people who lived in Judea at the time. There are extra-biblical Babylonian references to diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him". The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá.

Some texts also included recommended incantations to increase the chances of recovery, showing that they believed magic spells would help control the cause.

But if we listen to the childish fantasies of creationists, we should conclude that this was deliberate, because an omniscient creator would know precisely what the microorganisms it designs will do and creates them for that purpose. Leaving humans ignorant was all part of the plan to allow the parasites to make them suffer, apparently.

How did the Cambridge-led scientists make this discovery? A press release gives the details:

Malevolent Desiger News - How Breast Cancer is 'Designed'

Malevolent Designer News

How Breast Cancer is 'Designed'

Image: thomasandreas/iStock/Getty Images Plus

How Breast Cancer Arises | Harvard Medical School

Bear in mind that Creationists believe all parts of the human body, indeed all parts of every living organism, were intelligently designed by an omniscience and omnipotent god. With omniscience comes inerrant foresight of the consequences of any particular design, so, whatever the design does, must be the intended outcome of the design, or else the designer is not omniscient and needs to wait to find out what its design does.

In that case it can't be described as omniscience, but still being intelligent, it should be capable of discarding a design that doesn't do what it wants and starting again. In other words, it should be capable of ensuring that anything it designs does exactly what it wanted it to do, and should do it efficiently, with minimal waste and with the minimal complexity.

In other words, omniscient or not, its designs should comply with the basic principles of intelligent design - minimal waste, minimal complexity and maximal fitness for a clear purpose and endurance over time.

Sadly, for creationists that's not what we see; instead, we see evidence of utilitarianism. Whatever conveys a short-term benefit in terms of producing more offspring that go on to reproduce, is retained, regardless of any long-term detriment, provided the short-term benefits outweigh the long-term detriments. However, the result is often suboptimal compared to what it would have been had there been no detrimental effects, or had the design been more efficient at what it does.

One of the pieces of evidence for utilitarian design is the replication of the entire genome in every cell in multicellular species, when only a small portion of it is needed in specialised cells, and a characteristic of multicellularity is cell specialisations. This ludicrously wasteful method of cell reproduction, retained because it was the method used in the ancestral single-celled species, has meant that a complex system of epigenetics is needed to turn off the unwanted genes and to ensure just the right genes are active when needed. It also requires another complex mechanism for detecting and repairing the frequent mistakes that replicating billions of base pairs of DNA inevitably produce, because the method of replication is far from perfectly designed.

For more about epigenetics and why it is needed, see The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, pp. 109-115

The result is two of the hallmarks of bad design - prolific waste and unnecessary complexity. And now, as shown by this piece of research by Harvard Medical School scientists, harmful consequences. As though the risks of developing a cancer due to run-away replication of cells, as sometimes happens when cell replication goes wrong, the scientists have discovered that one of the types of one of the commonest cancers, breast cancer, is caused when the sex hormone, oestragen, needed for reproduction, enhances the probability of things going wrong and producing a cancer.

Traditionally, creationists faced with this sort of evidence against intelligent design, resort to religious mumbo-jumbo and start gibbering about 'The Fall' allowing 'sin' to enter the world, as though there is some other intelligence, empowered by 'sin' against which their supposedly omnipotent god is powerless, or this thing called 'sin' is itself capable of intelligently creating things. But what of these problems - the result of cell replication going wrong because of the sex hormone that in needed for reproduction in women, did their putative designer not design? Cell reproduction or sexual reproduction?

The research and its significance are explained in a Harvard Medical School press release by Ekaterina Pesheva: