Unintelligent Designer News - Designed a Cure For COVID-19; Gave It To LLamas - Or Is It Malevolence?

How the single domain antibody locks onto the spike protein’s base

Researchers identify new antibodies against current and future coronaviruses | VIB.BE - Home

Hot on the heels of the news that the putative intelligent designer behind creationism apparently devised a method to prevent the spread of cancer cells through the body—then handed it to the sea cucumber, a group of species not especially prone to cancer—comes another remarkable revelation.

It now appears that this same designer, if we accept the claims of ID creationists, has also developed a highly effective mechanism for disabling the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. And once again, rather than bestowing this gift upon humans, the species most affected by the virus, the designer gave it to llamas — creatures not exactly known for their vulnerability to coronaviruses.

The mechanism in question involves relatively simple molecules known as single-domain antibodies, or VHHs—also referred to as nanobodies. These are much smaller than the conventional antibodies produced by most animals, including humans. They work by binding tightly to the virus’s spike proteins, effectively neutralising it by preventing it from prising open host cells and initiating infection. Even more impressively, these nanobodies appear to be broadly effective against a wide range of SARS-related coronaviruses.

While creationists might marvel at the ingenuity of such a designer, they would be hard-pressed to explain — or more likely, would simply ignore — why this supposedly anthropophilic intelligence chose not to equip humans with such a defence. Instead, it stood idly by as millions suffered and economies collapsed, despite having the ‘cure’ readily available.

This unique llama-specific mechanism was discovered by a team of researchers led by Prof. Xavier Saelens and Dr. Bert Schepens at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie) – University of Ghent (VIB-UGent) Center for Medical Biotechnology.

Malevolent Designer - Creationism's Putative Desiger Designed A Way to Prevent Cancer Spreading - And Gave It To Sea Cucumbers!

A sugar compound found in sea cucumbers could hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer, according to a recent UM-led study published in Glycobiology.

Graphic by Stefanie Goodwiller
University Marketing and Communications

Sea Cucumbers Could Hold Key to Stopping Cancer Spread | Ole Miss

Imagine you're a designer, and you've created a species — humans — for whom you have a particular fondness. Only, something keeps going dreadfully wrong with your blueprint. A large number of them keep dying because their cells become cancerous when they fail to replicate properly, and these cancers then spread to other organs, which ultimately give up the ghost.

Now, you can’t quite work out why these cancers start. For some reason, you've included substances called glycans on the surfaces of cells, and — just to complicate things — you’ve made cancer cells produce an enzyme called Sulf-2, which alters these glycans to help the cancer spread. Your solution? A stroke of genius: create another enzyme that inhibits Sulf-2. And lo! It works.

So, who do you give this life-saving enzyme to?

If you're creationism’s supposedly super-intelligent designer, you don’t give it to your favourite species — the one made in your own image, no less. No, instead you bestow this miracle molecule upon… sea cucumbers. A species that, incidentally, doesn’t even have a problem with cancer.

This, if they actually understood the subject properly, is what Intelligent Design creationists consider compelling evidence of a supremely intelligent designer.

The discovery that sea cucumbers possess this enzyme was made by researchers at the University of Mississippi and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Their findings are published in the journal Glycobiology and can be read here.

It’s also neatly summarised in a University of Mississippi news article:

Refuting Creationism - Co-Evolution of Humans and Influenza Viruses - Just as the TOE Predicts

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

H3N2 virus is a respiratory viral infection of the influenza A virus.

Large-scale immunity profiling grants insights into flu virus evolution | For the press | eLife

In a striking confirmation of evolutionary theory—and a clear rebuttal of several fundamental creationist claims—scientists have demonstrated a close correlation between population-level immunity and the evolution of influenza viruses to evade that immunity. The findings, reported in eLife, align perfectly with predictions made by evolutionary biology: as the immune landscape of a population shifts, so too does the genetic makeup of viruses in an ongoing evolutionary arms race.

Disappointingly for creationists hoping for signs that biomedical science is abandoning evolution in favour of supernatural explanations, there is no such evidence. Nowhere in the study is there a hint that scientists are retreating from evolutionary principles or embracing a non-falsifiable belief system involving mysterious, unexplained entities. On the contrary, the researchers are clear and unequivocal: their results reinforce the view that viral evolution is a dynamic, adaptive process shaped by natural selection in response to host immunity.

Even more troubling for proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) is the unavoidable implication that the viral mutations observed in this study constitute what William A. Dembski calls "complex specified information"—which he argues can only arise through the intervention of an intelligent designer. If one follows that line of reasoning, the logical (if deeply uncomfortable) conclusion is that this designer is actively modifying viruses to undermine the very immune systems it supposedly created to protect us. Such behaviour can hardly be described as intelligent and is incompatible with the benevolent deity so often associated with the Intelligent Design movement.

Malevolent Or Incompetent Design? - Or Just Mindless Evolution?

Chikungunya virus has become a disease of global concern due to its potentially disabling consequences and its efficient transmission.

The Aedes mosquito is the primary vector for the Chikungunya virus

LJI scientists uncover clues to how a viral infection can lead to arthritis-like disease – lji.org

Scientists believe they have uncovered a mechanism by which a viral infection can trigger a persistent autoimmune response, leading to chronic and often severe pain.

If fully understood, this discovery poses a significant challenge to Intelligent Design (ID) creationism. Under the ID paradigm, such an outcome leaves us with two unpalatable options: either the designer is incompetent, having failed to foresee the consequences of a poorly calibrated immune system, or the suffering inflicted on random individuals is intentional—engineered by design.

This finding also reignites a long-standing issue for creationism: the existence of parasites, particularly viruses. According to criteria promoted by Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski ("complex specified information") and Michael J. Behe ("irreducible complexity"), viruses must be regarded as the product of intelligent design. Yet these same entities are responsible for making us ill—seemingly by the same designer who supposedly crafted our immune system to protect us from them. The contradiction is striking.

The explanation stems from recent work by a research team at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and is published in Cell Reports Medicine.

Malevolent Designer News - How an Intelligent Designer COULD Have Made us all Immune to HIV but Chose not to

Researchers map 7,000-year-old genetic mutation that protects against HIV – University of Copenhagen

Let’s step into the mindset of an Intelligent Design (ID) creationist for a moment, as we examine a recent scientific study investigating why a small minority of people are immune to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), while the vast majority are not.

A research team from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) at the University of Copenhagen, led by Professor Simon Rasmussen, has discovered that this immunity is conferred by a genetic mutation. This mutation originated in a single individual who lived near the Black Sea between 6,700 and 9,000 years ago.

According to Discovery Institute Fellow William A. Dembski, this mutation would represent what he calls “complex specified information”, a concept he attributes to an intelligent designer. Dembski argues that only such a designer could create the necessary genetic information, as mutation and natural selection alone are not goal-directed and therefore cannot produce the desired specificity. However, Dembski is notably vague about how we can objectively determine what genetic information is “specified” and what is not. He appears to rely on subjective judgement, essentially deeming any beneficial mutation as “specified”, while dismissing deleterious mutations as irrelevant.

Even granting Dembski his biased subjectivity, we are left with the implication that the mutation which conferred HIV immunity to this individual's descendants must have been “specified” by his proposed intelligent designer.

This raises an obvious question: if the intelligent designer of humans could have provided our species with immunity to HIV, why did it choose not to do so from the outset? Why rely on what appears to be a slow, natural evolutionary process to spread this mutation through the population—one that depends on people dying of HIV while those with the mutation survive and reproduce, creating the selection pressure for its spread? A process so gradual that, to this day, it remains a rare trait in the human gene pool, with only 18-25% of Danes carrying the mutated gene.

It also raised a couple of theological question for creationists: why would an omnibenevolent creator create HIV with its 'designed' ability to bypass our immune system the same designer allegedly designed to protect us and how is that an intelligent act by an omnibenevolent deity?

Malevolent Designer - How The Influenza Virus Appears To Be Intelligently Designed to Make Us Sick

Confocal microscopy of a cell (magenta, cell nucleus in blue) of the A549 cell line on immobilized influenza viruses (green).

© HZI / Broich

Influenza virus. 3D illustration showing surface glycoprotein spikes hemagglutinin purple and neuraminidase orange.

Image Credit: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock.

HZI | How influenza viruses communicate with cells

In their attempts to pass creationism off as legitimate science, Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe have unwittingly undermined their own case. Their arguments—largely based on a classic god-of-the-gaps fallacy and a false dichotomy—can just as easily be turned against the very idea that their supposed intelligent designer is the God of the Christian Bible.

While they stop short of making that claim explicitly, the infamous Wedge Document [1.1], which outlines the political aims and strategy of the Discovery Institute, leaves no doubt: their ultimate goal is a fundamentalist Christian theocracy governed by so-called "Christian principles" and that selling the idea that 'Intelligent Design' creationism is real science, is a fundamental aspect of that strategy because it would enable them to teach creationism to children at taxpayers' expense, under the guise of real science.

And yet, even within their own paradigm, the evidence points not to a benevolent deity but to something far more disturbing.

Take, for example, recent research from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, which offers a striking illustration of what Dembski might call "complex specified information" and what Behe might regard as "irreducible complexity". The study reveals how the influenza virus is 'designed'—if one accepts their terminology—with remarkable sophistication to circumvent our defences and invade human cells. Ironically, these very defences are what the same creationists insist were intelligently designed to protect us—against, among other things, intelligently designed viruses. We are left, according to this worldview, with the absurd spectacle of a designer who engineers both the pathogens and the immune system meant to defend us from them—a system that, demonstrably, does not always work.

And this is held up as evidence of a supreme intelligence!

Far from supporting creationist claims, these findings align far more convincingly with what we would expect from a blind, indifferent process of evolution—one that requires no designer at all. Once again, creationists are faced with an uncomfortable dilemma: either accept the notion of a malevolent and inept designer or acknowledge the explanatory power of natural selection and evolutionary biology.

Unintelligent Design - The Design Defect That Can Cause a Cleft Palate - Incompetence, Malevolence or Evolution?

Medical science corrects a design defect.

Source

New study reveals how cleft lip and cleft palate can arise | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, I present numerous examples demonstrating that the human body is not the product of intelligent design, but rather the outcome of an evolutionary process characterised by compromises and suboptimal solutions. Evolution is constrained by what it has to work with and must continually balance competing demands—for instance, short-term reproductive success versus long-term health and well-being, which often contribute little or nothing to the long-term propagation of genes.

The result is an error-prone and overly complex system built upon earlier suboptimal compromises. This complexity gives rise to the many defects and medical problems to which humans are prone—problems that would not exist if the human body were the creation of an intelligent and benevolent designer, such as the deity posited by creationist belief systems. Such a deity would surely have designed a body so robust that there would be little need for a medical profession, save perhaps for treating accidental trauma. The very existence of hospitals and medical science stands as a testament to the failure of the human body's design to approach anything resembling the perfection many creationists claim.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have identified yet another example of this flawed complexity: a defect in transfer RNA (tRNA) linked to babies being born with a cleft lip and palate. The defect lies in the DDX1 gene, which is essential for proper tRNA function. Without it, tRNA cannot deliver amino acids to ribosomes to synthesise proteins. In the absence of this crucial process, the cells that form the upper lip and the roof of the mouth cannot fuse correctly during development.

The findings, by a team led by Michaela Bartusel, are published in The American Journal of Human Genetics.

Malevolent Design - Why Did Bats Get a Better Immune System Than We Did?

A Carollia perspicillata bat from a colony that had been maintained at WSU Vancouver.

Photo: WSU

Seba's short-tailed bat, Carollia perspicillata

By Desmodus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Bat cells could aid in fighting humans’ most deadly diseases | WSU Insider | Washington State University

Creationists assert that humans are the special creation of their designer god, placing humanity at the pinnacle of 'creation'. Even those theists who accept the Theory of Evolution but believe it was guided by God with humans as the intended ultimate outcome, regard humanity as their deity's supreme achievement.

If this claim were accurate, it would be reasonable to expect humans to possess the optimal anatomical and physiological characteristics across all biological systems. In reality, numerous species exhibit superior traits and abilities compared to humans—traits which, had they been bestowed upon humans, would have significantly improved our wellbeing and survival capabilities.

For instance, birds have a respiratory system far superior to mammals, including humans, enabling efficient oxygen exchange during flight. Raptors possess remarkable eyesight, allowing them precise vision at speeds that would render nearby objects a mere blur to human vision. Elephants, sharks, and naked mole rats exhibit extraordinary resistance to cancer. Furthermore, many mammals experience lower perinatal mortality rates than humans even with modern medical intervention.

As highlighted in a recent study published in PLOS Biology, bats tolerate viral infections that are often fatal to humans, so they can harbour evolving viruses that, when they find their way into humans, can result in serious pandemics such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

If we entertain the creationist argument, their purported intelligent designer had already perfected these advantageous traits in other species. Yet, paradoxically, humans were deprived of these beneficial adaptations. This scenario suggests a designer whose decisions could only be interpreted as either incompetent or malevolent. It is the equivalent of a car manufacturer having designed a super-efficient, low-emission and cheap engine in one of its models, continuing to fit an old, expensive, wasteful and polluting engine to its top of the range model.

However, the evolutionary explanation — that different species evolved distinct traits adapted specifically to their environmental pressures — fully clarifies why humans possess adequate but not necessarily optimal traits. Unfortunately for creationists, adherence to their dogma forces them to dismiss this rational explanation, instead endorsing a narrative that inadvertently portrays their intelligent designer as either incompetent, malevolent, or potentially both.

That bats have superior immune system to humans has long been known, but why that is in terms of their cell physiology is still something of a mystery. Now, however, a team of researchers led by Washington State University molecular virologist Michael Letko has developed two lines of bat cell cultures which can be used to study how their immune system responds to different viruses, for example, the ebola virus, with a view to utilising that information to treat infections in humans.

Their findings are the subject of a research paper in PLOS Biology and are explained in a Washington State University (WSU) news item:

Malevolent Design - How Dembski's 'Complex Specified Information' Causes Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Rapid growth of blood cancer driven by a single genetic ‘hit’

William A. Dembski’s concept of complex specified information (CSI) remains ambiguous—arguably by design. His use of the word specified is particularly opaque: is he referring to information that produces outcomes he wishes his readers to believe are purposeful and intelligently designed by a particular deity, or is the term intended to encompass any genetic information that results in any outcome—beneficial, neutral, or harmful?

Taken at face value, and in the absence of a clear, testable definition, there appears to be no reason Dembski’s concept could not apply to information that is ultimately detrimental, either to the organism itself, or to another organism in the case of parasites or cancer. Why, for instance, should we conclude that the complex information in a gene enabling the expansion of the human brain and the enhancement of cognitive function was specified, but that the equally complex genetic information enabling a cell to become a malignant cancer, or allowing the Plasmodium falciparum parasite to evade anti-malarial drugs, was not also specified by the same intelligent designer?

Given that Dembski is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute — an organisation notorious for its Wedge Strategy, which seeks to undermine public trust in science through disinformation and misrepresentation while promoting creationism under the guise of scientific legitimacy — it is unsurprising that complex specified information remains a nebulous and ill-defined term. The strategy’s aim has never been to engage in genuine scientific discourse or subject its claims to critical scrutiny, but rather to advance a religious agenda while avoiding the accountability that comes with reasoned analysis and empirical testing. A cynic might conclude that the leading ID advocates know their claim has no scientific basis but want their target audience to believe otherwise.

So, I invite Intelligent Design creationists to explain why the recent discovery of a gene that promotes the rapid early development of acute myeloid leukaemia should not be an example of Dembski's 'complex specified information' and so evidence that Dembski's intelligent designer designed acute myeloid leukaemia, or whether Dembski's term is deliberately vague so as to appeal to people looking for confirmation of existing bias.

Unintelligent Design - If Scientists Can Do It, Why Can't an Intelligent, Omnipotent Designer - If It Wanted To?

Treatment for mitochondrial diseases within reach | University of Gothenburg

If the human body had truly been intelligently designed by an omnibenevolent, omniscient deity, it would operate flawlessly under all conditions, free from the compromises and constraints inherent in evolutionary history.

Were this the case, much of modern medicine would be unnecessary, limited perhaps to the management and repair of traumatic injuries. Parasites, should they exist at all, would be effortlessly repelled by a perfect immune system. Genetic and structural defects, such as hernias, atherosclerosis, autoimmune disorders, blindness, deafness, neurodegenerative diseases, and complications in childbirth would simply not occur.

However, as I showed in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, the human body is not the product of intelligent design; it has evolved through a process marked by trial and error, adaptation to existing structures, and the utilitarian pressures of survival and reproduction. This explains the vast array of medical conditions that keep healthcare systems busy, often stretched to their limits. It also drives the extensive scientific research dedicated to discovering the causes and developing cures for various illnesses—achievements that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator, if one existed, presumably would have provided already.

Recent news highlights this contrast starkly. Scientists may have discovered a groundbreaking cure for a rare mitochondrial disease caused by mutations in the POLG gene, a condition that leads to severe disability or even early death. This advancement prompts a critical question for creationists: If human scientists can find solutions to such devastating genetic problems, why can't—or won't—your purported intelligent designer? And perhaps, more to the point, why was this defect designed in the first place?

Malevolent Designer News - How Monkeypox Is Being Redesigned to Infect More People

Mpox could become a serious global threat, scientists warn | University of Surrey

Science has just dealt creationism another body blow.

Researchers from the University of Surrey, UK, have demonstrated that the monkeypox virus has undergone a mutation that enhances its ability to spread more readily from person to person through direct contact. This increased transmissibility raises the concern of a potential global pandemic.

Since this mutation confers a benefit to the virus, it aligns with William A. Dembski's concept of 'specified complexity', which he uses to argue for intelligent design. By extension, Dembski’s argument suggests evidence of an intelligent designer, whom his intended audience typically identifies as the Christian God.

However, because the mutation has resulted in a greater prevalence of the mutated form of the virus compared to non-mutated forms, this clearly demonstrates evolution through natural selection. Consequently, it contradicts the notion of 'devolution' proposed by Michael J. Behe, who suggests that parasites and pathogens represent biological deterioration rather than adaptive evolution.

Therefore, the new variant of the monkeypox virus presents either evidence supporting creationism's deity — which would imply intentional creation of viruses specifically designed to cause illness—or clear evidence supporting evolution through natural selection.

Malevolent Designer News - How C. difficile is Designed to Kill Off Competition in Our Gut

C. diff uses toxic compound to fuel growth advantage VUMC News

Like all organisms, and particularly pathogenic parasites that colonise our intestines, Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) must compete with other organisms for nutrients. This competition inevitably fuels evolutionary arms races.

For devotees of creationism’s ‘intelligent designer’, C. diff might appear to be a cunning response to medical science's successful use of antibiotics against bacterial pathogens. This is because C. diff is equipped with multiple antibiotic-resistance genes, allowing it to thrive in hospital environments. It often infects patients who are already vulnerable due to other health conditions or compromised immunity, making it a significant medical challenge.

Furthermore, if one follows William A. Dembski's reasoning, the ‘complex specified information’ in C. diff’s genome, which grants it a competitive edge, must logically be attributed to an intelligent designer. Michael J. Behe’s attempt to absolve his version of an intelligent designer by blaming ‘sin’, ‘genetic entropy’, or alleged ‘devolution’ fails here. A mutation that clearly provides an adaptive advantage cannot logically be termed a ‘devolution’ from a supposedly more ‘perfect’ ancestral state.

If creationism’s intelligent designer intended to kick people when they were down, it could hardly have done better than designing C. diff.

How C. diff competes for resource in our gut by waging chemical warfare against the other gut biota is the subject of a paper in the journal Cell Host & Microbe by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Their findings are described in VUMC News:

Refuting Creationism - How Chimpanzees Have Evolved For Different Parasites, Including Malaria

Mother and baby chimpanzee in Uganda.

Kevin Langergraber, The Ngogo Chimpanzee Project.

Chimpanzees are genetically adapted to local habitats and infections such as malaria | UCL News - UCL – University College London

It can't be easy making a living as a creationist grifter when science continually undermines your claims, exposing your misrepresentation of evolutionary biology and eroding your credibility — even among the faithful supporters you count on to pay for confirmation of their biases. It must be a relief that your target will rarely, if ever fact check your claims, making them easy victims of your disinformation.

So, you can take comfort in the fact that none of your marks will read this piece of research that shows how chimpanzees are closely related to humans and have evolved over time to adapt to a number of different environments, much the way the ancestors of modern humans adapted when their environment changed from forest to savannah, some 6 million years ago.

Included in the study is how chimpanzees, who have been suffering from malaria for much longer than humans, humans having acquired their most deadly species of the plasmodium parasites from chimpanzees only some 300,000 years ago and possibly as recently as 50,000 years ago, have evolved resistance to the parasite so they now show almost no signs of infection.

Malevolent Design - How a Design Blunder Caused Parkinson's Disease - Or Was It Malevolence?

Two PINK1 proteins are shown attached to the membrane of a mitochondrion for the first time.

Scientists solve decades-long Parkinson’s mystery | WEHI

One of the causes of Parkinsonism is the accumulation of defective mitochondria in neurone leading to the death of these cells and reduced neurotransmitter production. Under normal circumstances, a protein known as PTEN-induced putative kinase 1 (PINK1) attaches to the surface of damaged mitochondria and facilitates their destruction, but when a mutation causes PINK1 to malfunction, this cell hygiene mechanism fails.

The question for creationists is why this cell hygiene process is needed in the first place when an intelligent designer could have designed more robust mitochondria, and why does it depend on an error-prone process where a simple mutation is the gene for a key protein can cause the whole thing to fail?

In fact, of course, what we have here is an example of a layer of complexity being necessary because a fundamental process is suboptimal, when a well-designed process would need no such additional layer of complexity. Additional complexity simply multiplies that opportunity for failure, especially when the additional complexity is itself suboptimal.

As an example of putative intelligent design, the result is exactly what we would expect a mindless, unintelligent process to produce.

Malevolent Design - The Sneaky Way The Epstein-Barr Virus Can Cause Multiple Sclerosis

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)

Image: Getty Images

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is very common and can cause glandular fever in young adults.

Image: Getty Images

Genes combined with immune response to Epstein-Barr virus increase MS risk | Karolinska Institutet

To believe in the childish notion of intelligent design by an omniscient, magical designer is to believe two things:

• That it created our shoddy immune system that not only fails to protect us from pathogenic organisms such as bacteria, fungi and virus that frequently infect us.
  
• That it also designed those pathogens and gave them the ability to not only evade our immune system but also turn it against us to ensure we suffer the long-term effects of infections, even when we have eliminated the causative parasite from our bodies.

In other words, creationism is to believe the putative designer is incompetent and/or malevolent.

Malevolent Designer News - How Tuberculosis Is Protected During Airborne Transmission

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

Scientists have discovered a family of genes that becomes essential for survival specifically when the tuberculosis pathogen is exposed to the air, likely protecting the bacterium during its flight.

Image: iStock; MIT News.

Study: Tuberculosis relies on protective genes during airborne transmission | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Imagine you're the designer of a nasty little pathogen that is designed to make people sick and die, but you have a problem. The organism needs to get from one victim to the next in order to spread and make as many people sick as possible, but, as an obligate pathogen, it is designed to life in the moist warm interior of its victims, so is not very good at living outside, where it needs to be, if only briefly, to get into its next victim.

Quite a problem, eh?

But not something beyond creationism's divine malevolence, it seems, because, if you accept creationists' argument for the moment, the parasitic organism that causes tuberculosis is specially designed to survive while in transit, so to speak.

Exactly how it does it has recently been discovered by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their collaborators. The key to its survival is a family of genes that were previously believed to be non-essential because they had no effect when injected into a potential host but have now been shown to be essential for survival outside a host's body.

Incompetent Design - Failing To Plan Is Planning to Fail - And A Fatal Cancer Is The Result

Stress

Chronic stress and obesity work together to accelerate pancreatic cancer development and growth, study finds | UCLA Health

It’s a fundamental principle of management that failing to plan is, in effect, planning to fail. The future is inevitable, so preparation for it is essential.

Creationism’s supposed designer, however, is claimed to be both omniscient and omnipotent — fully aware of the future and capable of shaping it. In fact, many fundamentalist believers assert that this designer has a specific plan for each individual, meaning it doesn’t just foresee the future but actively creates it.

Logically, then, an intelligent, all-knowing creator should have planned accordingly, yet the evidence suggests otherwise. Our bodies are poorly adapted to endure the demands of modern urban life in a technologically advanced society, indicating a lack of foresight in their design.

The alternative explanation? This designer was fully aware of our future needs but deliberately created a body ill-suited for them.

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.