Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted A Solutions For It's Own Incompetence, To Ensure Cancers Survive

The Pol-θ enzyme (blue) joins two parts of a broken DNA strand (yellow).
This process is mutagenic and can give rise to cancer.

Credit: Scripps Research

How a crucial DNA repair protein works—and what it means for cancer treatment | Scripps Research

According to creationist mythology, once upon a time a magic creator created animal life complete with DNA which needs to be replicated every time a cell divides for growth and/or repair.

Unfortunately, the process it designed to make this happen wasn't very well designed, so the resulting DNA is often broken or faulty. DNA can be broken in a number of ways, all of which could have been avoided by a more robust design, which should have been within the capabilities of an omniscient deity, capable of creating living organisms ex nihilo:

DNA double-strand breaks can occur in multiple phases of the cell cycle, not just mitosis. While replication stress is a major endogenous source, environmental factors like radiation, chemicals, and viruses can also introduce DSBs. Cells rely on homologous recombination (HR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and alternative end joining (alt-EJ) to repair these breaks, though error-prone pathways like Pol θ-mediated repair contribute to mutagenesis.

Then, in a method typical of creationism's incompetent designer, which in every respect resembles a mindless utilitarian natural process, proceeding without a plan and settling for suboptimal solutions, it added yet another layer of complexity as a work-around for its failure, and designed the enzyme, polymerase θ (Pol-θ), which searches the DNA looking for faults. Unfortunately, due to suboptimal design, this too fails and produces cancers.

Malevolent Designer News - The Clever Way The Herpes Virus Gets Reactivated

UVA IDs Trigger for Those Annoying Cold Sore Flare-ups

The herpes viruses are ingenious designs of creationism's divine malevolence which are highly infectious and, once infected, you have them for life.

Of course, there is no point in designing a virus to just live inside its hosts cells doing nothing to increase the suffering in the world, so they come with a number of responses to various triggers which cause them to proliferate and start infecting other people.

Since these abilities are undoubtedly beneficial to the virus, there is no rational way that this can be presented as 'devolution' from some assumed created perfection - the forlorn attempt by Michael J. Behe to excuse the Christin god from culpability for parasites.

However, William A. Dembski, another Deception Institute Fellow, claims that anything which a gene produces must have been specified by an intelligent designer, so followers of the ID cult are obliged by dogma to give credit to their preferred creator deity for the herpes virus.

Now researchers at the University of Virginia have discovered a surprising way in which herpes can be reactivated, and, true to creationism's divine malevolence's form, it takes advantage of the hosts response to other infections and rides piggy-back on the hosts immune system - an immune system the same alleged designer designed to protect us from the viruses it designed to make us sick (if you believe that childish superstition).

The Herpes virus can respond to a protein produced by cells subject to stress which normally activates the immune system. However, the herpes virus is reactivated and starts producing lots of new virus particles, so the sufferer becomes infectious again and infects lots of other people. Then, job, jobbed, the herpes virus goes back into hiding to wait for the next chance to be reactivated and begin to replicate again, often many years later.

Malevolent Designer News - How Brain Cancer Turns Our Immune System Against Us

The Wistar Institute Discovers a Promising Target in Brain Cancer - The Wistar Institute

It's an old trick often used by creationism's divine malevolence to turn a host's immune system against it and instead work for the parasite.

And, according to a discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute, this is exactly what one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer does by reprogramming the white blood cells known as neutrophils, so they supress any further immune response to the cancer.

Of course, whether you accept that or not depends on whether you've fallen for the disinformation promulgated by Deception Institute fellows such as William A Dembski and other leading apologists for the intelligent design cult. Dembski, for example, promotes the notion that genes which produce any given functional protein only do so if they've been given 'complex specified information' to enable them to produce that particular protein.

His presuppositional circular reasoning goes something like, the output from a gene must have been intentional and intent implies sentience, so an intelligent designer must have supplied the information in order to achieve a desired outcome. This of course ignores the fact that mutation and selection occurs in a gene pool consisting of millions of cells and not as a single event in a single cell. In a population of a million cells, the million to one chance mutation arises on average once every cell generation.

A cancer, which is a collection of cells in a hostile environment, can evolve by natural selection to survive and replicate in that environment, so the outcome will depend on the result of an evolutionary arms race.

But, using Dembski's self-referencing logic, believers in intelligent design have to accept that the 'complex specified information' that enables brain tumours to reprogram neutrophils and so supress the immune system, must have been provided by an intelligent designer to achieve exactly that result, because, so he wrongly argues, mutation and natural selection alone can't produce a strategy for survival.

The bad news for supporters of Dembski's divine malevolence is that the discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute may have tipped the balance in the arms race between human medical science and the malevolent designer in favour of human medical science, in that it suggests a form of treatment for this type of brain cancer.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Ensured Its Zika Virus Infects Developing Babies

Zika virus's non-structural protein NS1 (red) and mitochondria (green) travel through the tunneling nanotube (TNT, gray) from infected to uninfected placental cells.

Image: Mysorekar lab.

A representation of the surface of the Zika virus, with protruding envelope glycoproteins shown in red.

Kuhn and Rossmann research groups, Purdue University

Stealth virus: Zika virus builds tunnels to covertly infect cells of the placenta | BCM

I've written recently about the lengths creationism's divine malevolence must have gone to to ensure one of its nasty little parasitic pathogens, the zika virus, gets to infect as many of its potential victims as possible. Science has now revealed how it then ensures as many babies being carried by its pregnant victims as possible are infected, by sneaking past the maternal/foetal barrier in the placenta.

Zika, is, of course, the mosquito-borne virus that causes microcephaly and associated mental handicap in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.

To ensure the success of this method of increasing the suffering in the world, the designer had a major problem of its own making to overcome - it had given the human foetus a placenta that included a barrier between its circulation and that of the mother. This barrier is normally sufficient to prevent viruses crossing over into the developing foetus, so clearly, if an many children with microcephaly as possible are born, the designer had to find a way to bypass this barrier.

It produced the ingenious method of creating microtubules (small tunnels) between the mother's cells and the foetus's cells in the placenta and simply passing through them!

Unusually for creationism's divine malevolence, which normally behaves like a mindless evolutionary process and reinvents a novel solution for the same problem encountered by a different species, this is the same sneaky method used by a few other viruses to pass from cell to cell in a sheet of tissue, without going outside and making themselves available for the immune system to detect and respond to.

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Makes Its Host Destroy Its Own Brain

Beauveria bassiana on unidentified insect.

© Lisa Bennett (CC-BY 4.0)

Fungus ‘hacks’ natural immune system causing neurodegeneration in fruit flies - University of Birmingham

If we are to believe creationists, their god created insects such as fruit flies, Colorado beetles, etc., and then set about devising ways to kill them with, amongst other pathogens, fungi that infect them and destroy them from inside.

One of the problems this supposedly intelligent designer had to overcome was the immune system it had given the insects in order to protect them from the pathogens it was designing to kill them.

According to an open access paper just published in PLOS Biology by a team led by Professor Alicia Hidalgo from School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, one species of parasitic fungus, Beauveria bassiana, cleverly turns its host's immune system against its host, making it destroy its own brain. Although this fungus does not affect mammals, so poses no threat to humans, the team warns that it is possible that another fungus could use a similar technique against mammals, including humans.

Malevolent Designer News - How Cancer is Cleverly Designed to Trick Our Immune System

Mitochondrial transfer and metabolic reprogramming of the tumor microenvironment aid cancer immune evasion

Mitochondrial transfer and metabolic reprogramming of the tumor microenvironment aid cancer immune evasion.

How Cancer Cells Trick the Immune System by Altering Mitochondria - Okayama University

There is an ongoing arms race between medical science and cancer - and guess whose side creationism's intelligent designer appears to be on.

Yep, it's the same intelligent designer who designed cancers in the first place by creating an error-prone DNA replication mechanism that goes wrong, as does the error-correction mechanism it designed to try to rectify its faulty design with an added layer of complexity. And one of the results of it going wrong is cancer.

One of the more hopeful treatments for cancer was a tailor-made immunotherapy in which specific antibodies to the cancer cells were used to attack the cancer and treat it like a parasitic pathogen, by training the immune system to recognise the cancer and attack and destroy it.

But, true to form, creationism's divine malevolence has hit back by designing a response by cancer cells to attack by cells of the immune system.

We can be sure this is the work of creationism's intelligent designer because William A Dembski, the Discovery Institute's flunky and pseudoscientist in residence, tells us that any genetic sequence that produces a function must have been given 'specified information' in the form of the DNA that codes for that specific protein because, so he claims, specified information is too complex to have evolved.

Malevolent Design - How Sudan Virus is Cleverly Designed to Kill 50% of Its Victims

Cryo-EM structure of Sudan ebolavirus glycoprotein complexed with its human endosomal receptor NPC1

New Study Reveals How Sudan Virus Binds to Human Cells | Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center

It's shaping up to be a thrilling month for devotees of creationism's divine malevolence as science finds out just how brilliantly its nasty little parasites are designed to make us sick and increase the suffering in the world, although quite why any normal person would worship a hate-filled sadistic psychopath is even more of a mystery than the mechanism by which it designs and creates organisms.

The latest is the details of how the Sudan virus (a variant of Ebola with a 50% 'success' rate in terms of deaths of its victims) has an improved method of binding to our cells to gain entry and start the killing process. Like Ebola, it binds to receptors on the cell surface, but because it has just 4 different amino acids in its coat proteins, it binds much more efficiently - a factor which probably contributes to its high kill rate.

Malevolent Design - More Brilliance from Creationism's Divine Malevolence

Dengue signs and symptoms

Source: CDC

Female mosquito taking a blood meal

Hijacking of plasmin by dengue virus for infection - NUS Faculty of Science | NUS Faculty of Science

If you're a creationists who follows the latest science (if there is such a thing), you must be bursting with admiration for the ingenuity of your beloved intelligent designer for the way its brilliance at making us sick and spreading more suffering in the world is being revealed by science.

In the last few days, I've reported on how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is designed to hijack our cell's metabolic processes to ensure its own survival, and how the zika virus that cause the serious birth defect, microcephaly, in children if their mothers become infected during pregnancy, is brilliantly designed to make our skin produce more of the scent that attracts mosquitoes, so ensuring it is spread as widely as possible.

Now we have a superb example of this skill in malevolent design revealed by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) who have discovered how the dengue virus is designed to make sure as many people as possible are infected by it. And this is breath-taking in its ingenuity. It is spread by the divine malevolence's favourite insect vector - the mosquito.

Malevolent Design - How Zika Is Designed to Spread Maximum Suffering.

Zika manipulates the skin to make it more attractive to mosquitoes

Illustration of Zika virus in blood

Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library

Zika uses human skin as ‘mosquito magnet’ to spread virus further | LSTM

January was something of a joyous month for devotees of creationism's divine malevolence. Following closely behind the news of how it brilliantly designed HIV to use our cells defences against us so making it better at infecting and killing us, we have news of another breathtakingly brilliant design of a nasty little pathogen - the zika virus that causes microcephaly in children if their mothers become infected during pregnancy.

This news is that it turns our skin into a living 'magnet' to attract the vector that spreads it - mosquitos - so ensuring it gets transmitted to as many victims as possible. It does it by altering a gene and protein expression in dermal fibroblasts, causing the skin to produce odours that are attractive to mosquitoes. In effect, calling them to come and feed.

Before creationists start bleating unscientific and biologically non-sensical nonsense about 'genetic entropy' and devolution allowed by 'sin' I should point out that no mutation that conveys a benefit on an organism can be regarded as 'devolutionary'. It is classic evolution by natural selection. And, as per William Dembski's gibberish about 'specified complexity', any complex DNA or RNA sequence that codes for a specific function must be regarded as 'specified complexity', using his argument, so must have been specified by a magic designer, according to his misuse of statistics and probability. Or perhaps a creationist could explain why such a highly specific function of converting a human gene to make special mosquito-attracting scents, is not an example of Dembski's 'specified complexity'.

So, how was this, in creationist terms, intelligently designed virus, discovered to have this touch of brilliance in its design? That was the result if a new study by an international team led by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Their findings are published, open access, in Communications Biology.

Malevolent Design - The Sneak Tactics of Toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii.

Image by Michael Holmes

Toxoplasma gondii parasite uses unconventional method to make proteins for evasion of drug treatment

Here we are with yet another example of an organism that, if there is a designer behind it, that designer can only be described as malevolent and determined to maximise the suffering and misery in the world.

It is, of course, another example of a nasty little parasite which, if you subscribe to the creationist view that complexity 'proves' design, has been designed to ensure we are as vulnerable to is as possible by helping it evade the immune system and other mechanisms, supposedly designed by the same designer god to protect us from the parasites it designs to harm us.

This example is the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which is notorious for manipulating its natural victims, which are felines and their prey species. For example, mice infected with T. gondii lose their fear of cats so they get eten and the parasite gets into its primary host; infected chimpanzees develop a liking for the smell of leopard urine.

Humans are not the natural secondary host, but the parasite readily infects us as we catch it from cats. It is thought that about one third of humans are infected. Once infected it is impossible to get rid of from the body because, even if antibodies are produced by our immune system, the parasites go into a dormant state as cysts which can form in any organs of the body, including the brain.

Malevolent Design - How Malaria Is Being Redesigned to Keep On Killing Children

Photomicrograph of a blood smear contains a macro- and microgametocyte of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite

Photo Credit: CDC/Dr. Mae Melvin - This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL) #2704, Public Domain, Link

Study uncovers first evidence of resistance to standard malaria treatment in African children with severe malaria

In another twist of the arms race with human medical science Plasmodium falciparum, the malevolently designed parasite that causes malaria and kills hundreds of thousands of children a year, mostly in Africa, has developed resistance to Artemisinin. Scientists were already aware that resistance had arisen in cases of uncomplicated malaria, but this is the first such incidence of resistance in the more severe form of the disease.

Indiana University School of Medicine researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at Makerere University in Uganda have discovered a case of complicated malaria in a child in Uganda.

Mallevolent Design - How Salmonella Sneaks Past Our Defences To Make Us Sick

Salmonella infects the small intestine and alters the colon environment

Intestinal lumen

New study shows how salmonella tricks gut defenses to cause infection

There is a simple paradox at the heart of creationism that I have never even seen an attempt to resolve. It all comes from two beliefs: there is only one designer god capable of designing living organisms and that designer god designed us complete with our immune system with which we can attempt to resist attack by pathogens, and that pathogens are not the work of this design, but are the result of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' since Adam & Eve let 'sin' into the world. The fact that Michael J. Behe, who invented that excuse, has let slip that ID Creationism is Bible literalism in a lab coat seems to be lost on his followers who still dutifully insist that it is a scientific alternative to evolution and should be taught in school science class (presumably now with the tale of Adam & Eve taught as real history and 'sin' as a real force in science).

The paradox is, did the designer god give Adam & Eve an immune system, or did it design an upgrade when 'sin' allowed pathogens to exist? If the former, it was anticipating and planning for the so-called 'fall'; if the latter, it lacked foresight so is not omniscient.

But however creationists resolve this paradox they still have to explain why the 'intelligently designed' immune system doesn't work very well and why whatever is designing pathogens seems to be able to overcome it.

The nonsense about 'sin', 'the fall', etc., is trivially easy to refute because any improvement in a parasite's ability to parasitise its host can't possibly be regarded as a devolution from some assumed initial perfection because an improvement can't be worse that what it's an improvement on. The whole nonsense of 'devolution' is biological gobbledygook, intelligently designed to appeal to scientifically illiterate simpletons who want to fit the Bible superstition somewhere in the reasoning without bothering too much about the logic or the biology.

So, the paradox boils down to why an intelligent designer would be having an arms race with itself so the parasites it creates can continue to parasitise the victims it creates complete with their immune system it created to stop them. Creationists normally flee in terror at the mere mention of arms races, which is why you'll never see them discussed in the cult literature apart from where pathogens are waved aside as 'caused by sin', blah, blah, blah...
So, it would be refreshing indeed to see a genuine attempt by an intelligent design creationist try to give some rational explanation, and hopefully without giving away the fact that ID creationism is merely Christian fundamentalism in disguise, for the discovery by a new UC Davis Health study that shows how the Salmonella bacteria, a major cause of food poisoning, can invade the gut even when protective bacteria are present.

As an added embarrassment for creationists, Salmonella is closely related to Escherichia coli (E.coli) that they usually cite Michael J. Behe as 'proving' it must have been designed by their god because its flagellum is 'irreducibly complex'.

First a little AI background information about Salmonella, where it came from and what it does to us:

Malevolent Design - How Sleeping Sickness Parasites Are 'Designed' to Evade Our Immune System

Trypanosoma brucei

Sleeping sickness

Discovery Illuminates How Sleeping Sickness Parasite Outsmarts Immune Response | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health

Trypanosoma brucei is a blood-borne eukaryote parasite that should leave believers in an intelligent designer, open-mouthed in admiration for its inventive genius. Christian fundamentalist creationists of the white supremacist persuasion should also admire the racist that, through T. brucei, has managed to keep large parts of Africa technologically under-developed due to the difficult in maintaining herds of domestic animals where the vector of these parasites - the tsetse fly - is common.

As a vector, the tsetse fly is a triumph of malevolent design which I mentioned in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, but it would have been all for nothing without the nasty little T. brucei to cause sleeping sickness in humans and the debilitating disease "nagana" in cattle.

What creationist admires of the divine malevolence they believe designs these things should now be marveling at is the sheer brilliance of the design by which it manages to evade the immune system, which they believe was created by the same designer god which now regards his design as a problem to be overcome oh parasites like T. brucei can continue making Africans and their cattle sick.

Malevolent Designer News - Stand By For The Next Move In The Mpox Arms Race

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of mpox virus particles (light green) found within VERO E6 cells (teal).

NIAID Integrated Research Facility
Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Mpox virus particles

Mpox Vaccine Is Safe and Generates a Robust Antibody Response in Adolescents | NIAID: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

As Medical science announces success in the search for a vaccine against the mpox virus currently spreading misery and suffering around the globe, we can be as sure as can be that creationism’s divine malevolence is working on a variant with an inbuilt way to evade the antibodies the vaccine produces, in just the same way it did with COVID-19 - if you believe a magic designer is behind these things, the way intelligent [sic] design creationists do.

Unintelligent Design - The Blunder That Causes Cancers

Ludwig Cancer Research

It has often been a theme of my blog posts how, if we regard cells as the result of conscious (I won't use the term 'intelligent' as that's singularly inappropriate, as we shall see) design then the picture quickly emerges of a bungling incompetent, cobbling together Heath-Robinson solutions to problems of its own incompetent making and lack of foresight.

The entire system of epigenetics, for example, is only necessary in a multicellular organism with its cell specialisation because specialised cells only need a small subset of the entire genome, yet, because cells replicate using exactly the same process that single-celled organisms use, where the entire genome needs to be replicated in every daughter cell, the cells of multicellular organisms such as humans each receive the entire species genome. So, most of it needs to be turned off.

This is where the epigenetic system comes in where methyl groups are attached to key bases in the DNA which prevents that section being transcribed into RNA, effectively switching the gene off. There are other components to the epigenetic system, but that is the pertinent component as far as this particular blunder is concerned.

The problem starts when a methyl group is attached to a cytosine base (C in the CGTA genetic code) which is next to a guanine(G) base.

Unintelligent Design Or Sheer Malevolence? - Defective Sperm Puts Mother And Baby At Risk

AI-generated graphic illustrating preeclampsia
(with AI spelling)

ChatGPT4o

Defective sperm doubles the risk of preeclampsia | Lund University

Christian superstition insists that every person conceived is a creation of their omniscient, omnipotent god who knows and has always known, exactly who is going to be born and has an oven-ready plan for their entire existence. Each baby conceived was exactly as the Christian god intended, down to the last detail of the DNA Exactly which sperm fertilizes which egg when, is part of the god's omniscient, perfect plan.

Leaving aside the absurdity of throwing millions of sperms at a single egg to produce that conception, when only a predetermined one was going to be the winner in order to produce the predetermined genome, when a single sperm would have been just as effective, we are left with the disturbing idea that any and all genetic defects were the intended outcome of that conception; the intention of a supposedly omnibenevolent god.

Now, it might, in fact it definitely is possible for a Christian to imagine some ultimate good will come from a child with a genetic defect, but what if a defect in the sperm causes harm not just to the baby, but to the mother? Are we to conclude that a mother whose life is put at risk by a defective sperm from her partner was the intended victim of an 'all-loving' god? What possible good can come from a mother's (and almost invariably her baby's) life being in danger from something beyond her control? What possible good can come from preeclampsia?

Malevolent Design - How Chlamydia Is 'Designed' to Cause Maximum Sufferring.

Chlamydia pneumoniae

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Schematic representation of how a C. pneumoniae cell infects a human cell. The bacterium injects the protein SemD (green) into the cell, which activates the cell protein N-WASP, which in turn initiates vesicle formation.

Credit: HHU/Fabienne Kocher.

Universität Düsseldorf: Original or copy: How Chlamydia manipulate the host cell

The problem of parasites for creationists is one that, despite the best efforts of apologists like Michael J Behe of the Deception Institute, just won't go away.

Sadly, Behe shot himself in the foot with his original claim to have proven 'intelligent [sic] design in living organisms with his choice of the bacterial flagellum in E. coli, where he persuaded his willing audience that these nasty little pathogens had been intelligently designed - and by unspoken assumption, designed by the locally-popular god.

Now creationists wave his 'proof' of design as evidence for their creator god because only their god is capable of creating living organisms.

But, with characteristic double-think, creationists also argue that their god is omnibenevolent, so something else must have created parasites like E. coli, and, courtesy again of Michael J. Behe, they cite 'Sin' causing 'genetic entropy' and the absurd idea of 'devolution' this supposedly causes, as the cause of parasites and pathogens (but not the bacterial flagellum, obviously!).

The problem with that notion is that they need to do their double-think trick one more time and believe that a trait with improves a pathogens ability to live and reproduce in its host makes it somehow less perfect that one without that trait. So, in the creationist's world, an improvement is a move away from perfection!

But, with a cult that appears to believe learning is a move away from the 'perfection' of pristine ignorance (from whence comes expertise in all aspects of science), that's probably not too difficult a feat of mental gymnastics for a creationist to perform.

Refuting Creationism - Even More Signs of The Divine Malevolence's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Over 160,000 new virus species discovered by AI - The University of Sydney

This is the second paper today to show the apparent obsession creationism's putative designer has with creating viruses, if you believe that superstition.

The first paper dealt with the discovery that there are some 600 different viruses to be found on a used toothbrush and on the shower heads in US bathrooms; this one reports on a discovery that makes that finding pale into insignificance. It is the discovery, using the machine learning of AI, of 161,979 new viruses!

This is just tip of the iceberg as the authors say the method just scratches the surface of biodiversity and opens up a world of discovery with millions more to be discovered.

Refuting Creationism - Is Creationism's Divine Malevolence Sufferring from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

Northwestern microbiologists found more than 600 viruses on samples collected from used toothbrushes and shower heads.

AI-Generated graphic (ChatGPT4o)

Structural model at atomic resolution of bacteriophage T4

By Dr. Victor Padilla-Sanchez, PhD https://www.drvictorpadillasanchez.com
Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Viruses are teeming on your toothbrush, showerhead - Northwestern Now

Creationism's putative creator is nothing if not obsessive.

One of its obsessions appears to be designing ever-more exquisite ways to kill its creation as almost nothing in nature exists that doesn't have something that lives on or in it, often killing it in the process or at least weakening it in some way.

Its most visible obsession seems to be with designing beetles of which there are some 500,000 species with more being discovered almost daily. It's highly likely that there may be as many as a million different beetles in the world, many of which catch and devour other arthropods.

But it's in the field of virology that we find another obsession with designing variations on a general theme. Not only are there literally hundreds of thousands of viruses but every species has multiple variants - look at the number of different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have emerged since the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic!

Malevolent Design - How The Black Widow Spider's Toxins Harm Us Mammals

Latrodectus hesperus

By Ken-ichi Ueda - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/121,
CC BY 4.0,Link

Latrodectus hesperus female with egg sac.

Scientists decode black widow spider venom

Black widow spiders have a cocktail of toxins, most of which are effective against their arthropod prey such as insects, but one of them, α-latrotoxin, is very effective against vertebrates, including humans, although even the smallest vertebrates don't normally feature in the black widow's diet.

So why did this toxin evolve?

Normally, a species which is capable of delivering a nasty, even lethal, bite to a threat, rather than to prey, evolves strategies for avoiding doing so, while warning that it could if it wanted to - rather like a creationists avoiding answering a question while pretending they could if they wanted to, only without the pretense. Most species do this with warning colours or, in the case of the rattlesnake, a warning rattle. This is because using venom against a threat might mean there isn't enough left if the next potential meal wanders by, so it's better to warn and threaten than to actually bite.

But not so the black widow, except for the strikingly marked European species, Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, and the South American, Latrodectus curacaviensis. If anything, the black widow is cryptocamoflaged to not be noticed in the dark places they inhabit.