Unintelligent Design - Malevolence or Incompetence? - Why Design A Uterus To Grow Fibroids?

Uterine fibroids

Hic et nunc via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Assistant Professor Stacey Schutte, left, and Research Associate Andreja Moset Zupan study new avenues to treat fibroids in Schutte's biomedical engineering lab in UC's Bioscience Center.

Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Researchers find ways that uterine fibroid cells respond differently from surrounding tissue | University of Cincinnati

Almost 80% of women of child-bearing age will develop uterine fibroids. Although usually not malignant, they can nevertheless be extremely painful, can cause bleeding and can lead to infertility. The economic cost of fibroids has been estimated to be some $9 billion in the USA alone.

Fibroids grow in response to the same hormones, oestragen and progesterone, which cause the endometrium to thicken then breakdown during the menstrual cycle. Now a research team at the University of Cincinnati have shown that cell stretching is also a factor in their growth.

Hormones and uterine stretching as the endometrium thicken and shrinks and during pregnancy and childbirth are, of course part of the normal state of affairs for the uterus that creationists believe must have been designed by their supposedly omniscience, omnipotent designer, so, if we accept that childish notion of magic design by an omniscient supernatural entity, for the sake of argument, we have to assume growing fibroids was all part of the plan, since it is not possible for an omniscient designer to not be aware of the outcome of its design and for it not to design with that outcome in mind.

So, the only alternative, within the creationist paradigm, is that fibroids are the accidental and unforeseen consequences of the design and function of the uterus - which would mean one of three things:

1. The designer was not omniscient.
2. The designer was incompetent.
3. If the designer was both competent and omniscient it must have been malevolent and intended a high percentage of women to suffer the pain and inconvenience of fibroids.

This discovery is the subject of a research paper in the journal F&S Science which, sadly is behind a paywall, but the Abstract in the form of a summary of the paper is available.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Intelligent [Sic] Designer' Denied Us The Ability To Regenerate Limbs But Gave It To A Jellyfish

The jellyfish Cladonema pacificum exhibits branched tentacles that can robustly regenerate after amputation.

© 2023 Sosuke Fujita, The University of Tokyo

Cladonema pacificum

How jellyfish regenerate functional tentacles in days | The University of Tokyo.

Imagine for a moment that you're creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer (the one on whom they've bestowed all the 'omnis' like omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence) and you've created lots of creatures with the ability to regenerate body parts like limbs, tails and tentacles when they lose them, but you haven't given this ability to all of your creation, especially the one you supposedly love above all the others because its designed to be in your own image and you created all the other species to be at the disposal of your favourite.

What are some of the reasons you might have created them without the ability to regenerate missing body parts?

• Incompetence? It can't be that because you're omnipotent, so nothing is impossible for you.
• Amnesia? You just forgot to! It can't be that because you're omniscient, so know all things, past present and future so must remember creating the ability to regenerate limbs in salamanders, for example.
• If it wasn't incompetence and it wasn't amnesia, it must have been deliberate. You chose not to because you didn't want your special creation to have this ability - even though you're allegedly omnibenevolent.

So creationists must be mistaken in at least one and possibly all of the qualities they've bestowed on you.

Or you've chosen to create humans and other animals, especially mammals, birds and most reptiles, less perfectly than you could have created them because you prefer to see them suffer when they have accidents.

And yet, according to recently published research by a Japanese research team, you gave that ability to a small jellyfish so it can regenerate its tentacles. Unless you prefer to see a human amputee struggle but not a jellyfish, why would you do that?

I'll leave that question for creationists to perform their usual intellectual gymnastic over, so they can continue to feel like the special creation of an omnipotent creator of the universe who loves them above the rest of its creation that it created just for them, like a narcissistic toddler, who thinks the world is just for him/her and someone must be making sure it stays that way.

Malevolent Design - How A Cat Poo Parasite Can Change Your Personality

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular, parasitic protozoan that causes the disease toxoplasmosis. Diagram of Toxoplasma structure.

Image Credit: Designua / Shutterstock

Toxoplasma 'cat poo' parasite infects billions – so why is it so hard to study?

In my last blogpost, I described how the parasitic organism, cryptosporidium, is one of those 'irreducibly complex' organisms that creationists have been fooled by Michael J Behe into believing are proof of their putative creator god, because, so their ignorant intuition tells them, there can only be one intelligent designer capable of designing an irreducibly complex structure such as the bacterial flagellum or the apical complex structure that all members of the Apicomplex phylum characteristically possess.

Sadly for them, though, their reliance on this 'proof' of their god precludes them from arguing that these nasty little pathogens that appear to be designed to make us and other animals sick is the work of another intelligent creator, 'Sin', so the inescapable conclusion must be that their beloved creator god is designing these pathogens to make us sick and to increase the suffering in the world.

As though that wasn't bad enough, we now have another related parasite, also a member of the Apicomplex phylum, that on the face of it, seems to be an even more determined attempt to make us sick. It's a parasite that once you have it, you have it for life, and the evidence is that it manipulates your behaviour and changes your personality too. This then raises doubts about the idea of free will that is a central part of creationist superstition, and notions of 'Original Sin' (that thing that can supposedly create parasites too).

This organism is Toxoplasma gondii which is carried by about 25% of the world's people, so the chance of you or me or any of your friends and family having it is quite high.

Malevolent Design - More Nastiness From The Pestilential Designer, Or God, As Creationists Call It

Infections from a diarrhoea-causing parasite are on the rise in the UK – but experts aren't quite sure why

Cryptosporidium is a eukaryote protozoan parasite which creationists dogma says must have been designed by their favourite designer because that is the only entity capable of designing complex organisms, including 'irreducibly complex' structures.

Embarrassingly for creationists who are hoping to be able to blame 'Sin' for them, they are hung out to dry on the same hook that Michael J. Behe hung them on with the flagellum of the pathological E. coli bacterium, which they now happily wave as 'proof' of their designer good. Protozoans of the Apicomplexa phylum, of which the cryptosporidia are species, all have the apical complex organelle which is essential for them to break into a cell in order to infect it.

The characteristic apical complex organelle of the Apicomplexa phylum

Cryptosporidia appear to have two functions: to increase the suffering in the world by causing gastrointestinal disorders, usually resulting in severe diarrhoea; and to make more copies of themselves to infect more people and animals and spread the suffering more widely. They have no known beneficial functions in respect of humans or their other host species.

The species Cryptosporidium hominis is an obligate parasite on humans, so, according to creationists superstition, must have infected one or two of the Ark survivors, assuming there were no more than two individuals of the species present. Either that, or, according to creationist mythology, it has been created in the last four thousand years, which rules out being created by 'Sin' as a result of 'The Fall', which would mean it predates creationism's genocidal flood.

First, some AI background by way of introduction to the subject:

Malevolent Design - Parasitic Mistletoe - Unintelligent Design, Malevolent Creation Or Evolution?

European mistletoe, Viscum album

Mistletoe haustorium on a birth branch.

At a time of giving and receiving, our many Australian mistletoes do it too

Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant and obligate parasite on many different species of tree. It can kill a heavily infested tree. Although mistletoe is photosynthetic, so produces its own sugars, it is dependent on its host for water and the nutrients such as nitrates and other minerals that the host plant obtains from soil. There is no evidence that mistletoe gives anything back to the host in the form of sugars.

Mistletoes and similar parasitic plants obtain the nutrients from their host via a structure called a haustorium which infiltrates the host tissues and forms a close association with the vascular bundles.

But why would an intelligent designer create all the complexity needed for a parasitic lifestyle when it had supposedly designed other plants to obtain nutrients from the soil, and simply added another layer of complexity between the host's roots and the parasitic plant's tissues to achieve the same result? In fact, this is just another example of the needless complexity that characterises evolved systems and distinguishes them from intelligently designed systems, which are characteristically minimally complex.
And it hasn't just done it once! There are over 100 parasitic species of similar plants in Australia alone, which I'll come to next, but first, a little AI background on mistletoe:

Malevolent Designer News - How Does Killing Millions of Seabirds Punish Humans For Adam's & Eve's 'Sin'?

Emperor penguins and southern elephant seals on a South Georgia beach

Emperor penguins and southern elephant seals on South Georgia.
Both species at risk from avian flu.

Avian influenza has killed millions of seabirds around the world: Antarctica could be next

Avian flu is currently devastating flocks of seabirds, wiping out breeding colonies and even spreading to mammalian species such as sea lions and the southern elephant seal, the mass deaths of which are believed to have been caused by the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus.

Creationists claim that pathological parasites like the influenza viruses are the result of Adam's & Eve's sin which their beloved god inflicted on the world without prior warning in a tyrannical act of mass punishment for an arbitrary 'wrong', designated as such without any logical reason and applied to a couple of people who weren't equipped to know right from wrong and who hadn't been made aware of the real consequences.

But how killing millions of seabirds, elephant seals and other species punishes mankind or why the entire creation is being punished for a human 'crime' is never explained, leaving creationists to perform the most contorted mental gymnastics and denial of basic logic to simultaneously ascribe this to their putative designer god and make excuses to absolve it of blame for its criminal behaviour, for fear it'll come after then for not loving it enough.

Enough of the childish superstition and now for the real-world science:

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Intelligent [Sic] Designer Stupidly Competes With Itself In An Arms Race.

These microscope images show how interferon in the nucleus raises levels of the protective protein IFI16 (stained green) from low background levels (left) to the higher levels needed to resist herpes infection (right).

Image: HMS MicRoN core imaging facility/
Nicolas Romero Rata

Oral Herpes simplex

How the Immune System Fights to Keep Herpes at Bay | Harvard Medical School

Throughout the Cold War, starting soon after World War II and continuing through most of the second half of the 20th Century, the world's great powers, led by America on one side and Russia on the other, competed in a wasteful arms race where one side tried to outdo the other by building more powerful bombs and better delivery systems while also building better defences capable of preventing successful attack by the other. Money and resources that went into this ultimately pointless arms race could have been used for better, more peaceful projects like better world health care, better education or ending poverty and famine, yet neither side could afford to do the sensible thing because neither side trusted the other to abandon the race and compete with peace instead.

Although we can understand the pressures and insecurities that caused these wasteful arms races, we can also see the ultimate futility of it all and how the costs escalate with every turn of the spiral.

But how much more stupid would it have been if both 'sides' had the same people running them - if both America and Russia had the same political and military leaders? In other words, if the arms race was being run by one side alone, for no better reason than that the leaders had amnesia and didn't know why they built a bigger bomb or a better defence system yesterday and woke up today faced with a threat they had designed yesterday and needed to spend today designing ways to cope with these new threats?

One might be tempted to call into question the sanity of these leaders and wonder about their fitness to lead. What on Earth had allowed them to behave so stupidly? And for what reason? It certainly would have had nothing to do with the health and welfare or safety of the populations of Russia or America, or indeed the rest of the world, so could not be excused as some sort of well-intentioned altruism. An OCD or sheer malevolence, maybe, but not benevolence.

And yet creationists worship what they believe is a supernatural entity who behaves exactly like the amnesiac maniac I've just described. The natural world it reputedly designed, according to creationists, is full of example of these pointless and wasteful arms races for no ultimate long-term benefit to either 'side'.

Malevolent Design - How A Chicken Virus Got More Deadly - Malice Or Evolution?

Ancient DNA reveals how a chicken virus evolved to become more deadly | University of Oxford

Marek's Disease Virus (MDV) is a serious infection in chickens that costs th4e poultry industry over $1 billion annually. Now an international group of virologists and archaeologists led by researchers from Oxford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, Germany, have discovered how it has evolved over time to become more virulent and deadly, or, as creationists insist, has been intelligently redesigned.

The team reached this conclusion from an analysis of the virus in modern and ancient chickens going back over the past 1000 years. The ancient samples were obtained from DNA extracted from chicken bones recovered from 140 archaeological sites in Europe and the Near East. This analysis showed that MDV was widespread in European chickens for at least 1000 year before being first described in 1907.

Unintelligent Design - Why Some Women Experience Morning Sickness during Pregnancy.

As many as seven in ten pregnancies are affected by nausea and vomiting.
1-3% are severe enough to require hospital treatment

Why seven in ten women experience pregnancy sickness

'Morning sickness, which is common in the earlier stages of pregnancy, and which, in its more severe form, hyperemesis gravidarum, can be seriously debilitating and may even require admission to hospital and iv fluids to prevent life-threatening dehydration, is now known to be caused by a protein hormone, known as GDF15, produced by the foetal part of the placenta.

This discovery, published yesterday in Nature, by a team from Cambridge University, UK, led by Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, and including researchers in Scotland, the USA and Sri Lanka, points to a potential way to prevent pregnancy sickness by exposing mothers to GDF15 ahead of pregnancy to build up their resilience.

It had previously been suggested that GDF15 might be acting on the mother's brain to make her feel nauseous. This has now been confirmed and found to be dependent on two factors:

1. How much of the hormone is being produced.
2. How sensitive to it the mother's brain is.

GDF15 is produced in low levels by all tissues outside of pregnancy and the mother's sensitivity to the hormone is related to how much of it she has been exposed to prior to becoming pregnant.
The team arrived at this conclusion after obtaining data from women recruited to a number of studies, including at the Rosie Maternity Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Peterborough City Hospital, North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust. They used a combination of approaches including human genetics, new ways of measuring hormones in pregnant women’s blood, and studies in cells and mice.

The team found that a rare genetic variant that puts women at a much greater risk of hyperemesis gravidarum was associated with lower levels of the hormone in the blood and tissues outside of pregnancy. Similarly, women with the inherited blood disorder beta thalassemia, which causes them to have naturally very high levels of GDF15 prior to pregnancy, experience little or no nausea or vomiting.

Most women who become pregnant will experience nausea and sickness at some point, and while this is not pleasant, for some women it can be much worse – they’ll become so sick they require treatment and even hospitalisation. We now know why.

The baby growing in the womb is producing a hormone at levels the mother is not used to. The more sensitive she is to this hormone, the sicker she will become.

Knowing this gives us a clue as to how we might prevent this from happening. It also makes us more confident that preventing GDF15 from accessing its highly specific receptor in the mother’s brain will ultimately form the basis for an effective and safe way of treating this disorder.

Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, co-senior author.
Co-Director of the Institute of Metabolic Science
and Director of the Medical Research Council Metabolic Diseases Unit
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

When I was pregnant, I became so ill that I could barely move without being sick. When I tried to find out why, I realised how little was known about my condition, despite pregnancy nausea being very common.

Hopefully, now that we understand the cause of hyperemesis gravidarum, we’re a step closer to developing effective treatments to stop other mothers going through what I and many other women have experienced.

Dr Marlena Fejzo, co-senior author
Center for Genetic Epidemiology
Department of Population and Public Health Sciences
Keck School of Medicine
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

The problem for creationists here is to explain why their putative designer god designed a protein which is normally very mild but rarely, can kill the mother and child and at the very least makes pregnancy a misery for a large number of women.

Their problem is compounded by the fact that, in this case, they can't blame it all on 'Sin' and let their little pet good off the hook, because the culprit, GDF15, has several important functions unrelated to pregnancy, so the side effects such as morning sickness and hyperemesis gravidarum appear to be an unforeseen consequence of it. No intelligent [sic] designer worthy of the name, especially a reputedly omniscient, omnipotent one, would design a protein hormone with unforeseen consequences, so we have to assume either it knew what it would do and didn't care, or it knew what it would do and designed it for that purpose. Briefly, GDF15 does the following:

What biological function does the hormonal protein GDF15, have? Growth Differentiation Factor 15 (GDF15) is a protein that plays a role in various biological processes, particularly in the regulation of energy balance and metabolic functions. Here are some key aspects of GDF15's biological functions:

1. Appetite Regulation: GDF15 is known to act as a satiety signal, meaning it can reduce appetite and food intake. It is produced in response to conditions such as inflammation, tissue damage, or cellular stress, and it signals to the brain to decrease food consumption.
2. Metabolic Regulation: GDF15 has been implicated in the regulation of metabolism. It can influence energy expenditure and may contribute to the control of body weight. Its levels are often elevated in conditions associated with weight loss, such as cancer or certain chronic diseases.
3. Anti-inflammatory Effects: GDF15 has anti-inflammatory properties and can modulate the immune response. It may play a role in limiting excessive inflammation during certain physiological or pathological conditions.
4. Cardioprotective Effects: GDF15 has been associated with cardioprotective effects. Elevated levels of GDF15 are often observed in response to cardiovascular stress, and it may have a role in protecting the heart and blood vessels.
5. Cancer-Related Functions: GDF15 is expressed in various tissues, and its levels are often increased in certain types of cancer. It may have both tumor-suppressive and tumor-promoting effects, depending on the specific context and type of cancer.

The exact mechanisms through which GDF15 exerts its effects are still an active area of research, and its functions can vary in different physiological and pathological conditions. It's important to note that the understanding of GDF15's functions is continually evolving as new research findings emerge.

So, creationists have a three-way choice here: Is this a result of:

1. Incompetence?
2. Malevolence?
3. Evolution?

Unintelligent Design News - How A Badly Designed Protein Causes Autoimmune Diseases

3D structure of Dectin-1 protein of Bubalus bubalis.

Yadav, B.; Tripathi, V.; Kumar, A.; et al (2012)

William Heath Robinson

Fungus-fighting protein key to overcoming autoimmune disease and cancer | Australian National University

The more you learn of creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer, the more like William Heath Robinson it becomes.

The main difference is that, no matter how ramshakled they were, William Heath Robinsons inventions actually worked, even if they didn't produce the required result. The same can't be said for creationism's god's designs. They resemble piecemeal designs where each part is designed in isolation in response to a problem, often a problem somewhere else in the design, where near enough is good enough and there is no joined up thinking.

Rather like a William Heath Robinson machine, conbbled together from disparate parts, but where when a knotted piece of string breaks, instead of replacing it with a new piece of string or tying the broken ends together, like Heath Robinson would, a different, weaker sort of string is designed and tied across the broken ends, but then that keeps breaking too.

An example of this inept design was discovered recently and found to be the cause of autoimmune diseases such as iritable bowel syndrome (IBS), type 1 diabetes, eczema and other chronic disorders. The problem is with a protein called DECTIN-1 (also known as CLEC7A) which is producd by the immune system in response to fungal infections. Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have discovered that a mutated form of DECTIN-1 limits the production of T regulatory cells or so-called ‘guardian’ cells in the immune system.

Mutations arise, of course, because of another poor design - the process for replicating DNA, which is so prone to errors that another mechanism for repairing it is needed. However this is also prone to errors, the result of which means that many of our cells carry mutations, some of which cause cancers.

The research is publshed in Science Advances and ex[lained in an Australian Nationa University News release:

Unintelligent Design - Or Is It Malevolence? How Bacteria Are Designed to Exploit Our Mucus

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Movement of mucus in the respiratory tract

Blausen.com staff (2014). "Medical gallery of Blausen Medical 2014"
Via Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

Bacteria's mucus maneuvers: Study reveals how snot facilitates infection | Penn State University

The mucous membrane lining our respiratory system has evolved (or, according to creationists, been intelligently [sic] designed) to keep our respiratory system clean as we breathe in air containing particles of dirt, dust, pollen and bacteria. It does this by secreting mucus that traps the particles, then ciliated cells on the surface sweep them towards our pharynx to be swallowed and disposed of in our digestive system where the proteins in the mucous are recycled.

Other body cavities are lined by a mucous membrane that serves to protect and keep the cavity moist and lubricated.

But, in one of those research papers that creationists have to avoid reading, a team of researchers from Penn State University, have shown how bacteria have evolved (or been intelligently [sic] designed, according to creationists) to exploit the mucous, the better to infect us and make us sick, and the thicker the mucus, the better it is for these would-be pathogens.

Infections by bacteria, known medically as opportunist infections, especially in the nasal sinuses and lungs, are a frequent complication of viral infections such as a common cold or influenza. These opportunist infections can be more dangerous than the virus infections that facilitate them.

The team showed that bacteria find it easier to swim, swarm and form colonies in thick mucus than in thin, watery mucus and that this swarming probably helps protect them from the antibacterial enzymes in the mucus.

Their research is explained in a Penn State news release:

Malevolent Design News - How 'Intelligently Designed' Pathogens Use The Tactics Of A Burglar To Make Us Sick

Model pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii

[Right caption/credit]

Pathogens use force to breach immune defenses, study finds: IU News

Creationists trying to defend their magic creator god argue that it didn't create pathogenic parasites and instead blame it on 'Sin'. Sadly for them, however, one of their leading cult gurus, Michael J. Behe, has pulled that rug from underneath them by writing a book in which he used the supposedly irreducibly complex flagellum of a common pathogen, Escherichia coli (E. coli) to argue that it must have been intelligently designed, (so God did it!). Behe's book, 'Darwin’s Black Box' is constantly being cited as 'proof' that the reputedly omniscience, omnipotent creator god of the Bible and Qur'an is real and creates things.

So, let's go with their 'proof of God' argument and assume therefore that pathogens are the intentional design of their putative designer god and were designed for the function they perform - making us sick, while producing more copies of themselves to make others sick too.

Now a team of researchers have shown the lengths this alleged designer god has gone to to continue making us sick and suffer. The team, led by Professor Yan Yu, of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry, Indian University, Bloomington, IN, USA have shown that the intracellular pathogens like Toxoplasma, tuberculosis, malaria and chlamydia don't use subtlety to gain entry into the cell, probably because this would provoke an immune response as our immune system, allegedly designed by the same intelligent designer to protect us from the pathogens it designed to harm us, tried to fight back. Instead, they use brute force to break into the cell and once inside use the same force to break into a cell vacuole where they are protected by the internal cell membranes.

How the research team which included Professor Yan Yu's colleagues from Indiana University with Thomas K. Gaetjens and Steven M. Abel of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA, made this discovery is explained in an Indian University new release:

Malevolent Designer News - Scientists Have Disovered the Sneaky Way Creationism's Putative Designer Created Childhood Leukaemia

Pediatric oncology: Scientists discover new Achilles heel of leukemia cells | Current news from the Goethe University Frankfurt

In leukemia, white blood cells divide uncontrollably.

Acute myeloid leukaemia, micrograph

Pediatric oncology: Scientists discover new Achilles heel of leukemia cells | Current news from the Goethe University Frankfurt

With the double-think that characterises creationsm, creationists will use, depending on what facts they are disputing, two mutually exclusive arguments:

1. A combination of the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacy. This argument depends on the assumption that there is only one supernatural entity capable of creating something as complex as DNA, with the conclusion "Therefore, God did it!", which of course is also a non-sequitur and an intellectually dishonest presupositional invocation of something unproven as evidence that it exists.
2. On another day, presented with something so patently evil as childhood cancer or nasty parasites that kill many and make life a misery for millions more (and not just humans, but just about every living thing) creationists invoke somethign called 'Sin' as being responsible for its design and/or creation.
   

In other words, they will argue both that their god is the only entity capable of creating anything, and that 'Sin' can create things too; and their supposedly omnipotent god is powerless to prevent it.

So, it will be interesting to see what arguments creationists will come up with to counter the argument that, if creationism has any substance, the same designer must have designed childhood leukaemia, in full knowledge of the suffering and grief it would cause not just to the child but to his/her parents and relatives.

But I suppose they could always cite William Lane Craig's repugnant defence of religiously-inpired infanticide - "killing children is not wrong because they go straight to heaven so it makes them happy".

But whatever excuse they make, creationists are hoist by their own petard in arguing the false dichotomy fallacy, so they are stuck with portrying the god they purport to worship as the designer of childhood leukaemia - a position they seem to prefer to having people accept that evolution by natural selection is responsible for the nastiness in nature as well as the wonderful.

So, given that a favourite subject for their argument from ignorant incredulity, is the structure of DNA, how will creationists react to the fact that a team of researchers from the Department of Pediatrics and the Institute for Experimental Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany has discovered a site in the DNA of cancer cells that is essential for leukemia cells to survive?

Creationism in Crisis - Which Side Should a True-Believing Creationist Be On? The 'Designer' Who Designs Resistance Or The Scientists?

Plasmodium falciparum parasites in a blood smear

Diagram of the complex eukaryote, Plasmodium falciparum

New approaches in the fight against drug resistance in malaria | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Despite asking creationists multiple times how they reconcile believing that their putative intelligent [sic] designer designs complex organisms, such as the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum which cause malaria, with their belief that this putative designer is the supposedly omnibenevolent god if the Bible and Qur'an, I can never get a rational answer.

Most often they resort to the fallback claim that parasites and the suffering they cause were not created by their putative intelligent designer, but by another designer they call 'Sin', which of course is nonsensical and borders on blasphemy because it denies the supremacy of their supposed designer god, and allows for another designer over whom their supposedly omnipotent god is powerless.

But, to their embarrassment, if they manage to do the joined-up thinking, their guru, Michael J. Behe - who has the status of a 'brilliant scientist' in creationist circles - wrote a book, The Edge of Evolution in which he argued (wrongly) that the development of anti-malarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum must have been intelligently designed, using the 'big scary numbers' tactic of arguing that the likelihood of each of the five steps needed arising by chance was so small, that the chances of all five of them occurring in the right sequence is so infinitesimally small that it couldn't have happened by chance alone, so needed divine intervention.

The fact that he used bad biology and even worse maths, in effect assuming that all the mutations had to happen together in as single cell as a single event, instead of in parallel across the species gene pool, as was shown by microbiologist Kenneth R Miller, is by the by, since creationists generally treat anything Michael J Behe says as proven science, they are stuck with his claim that their god is responsible for anti-malarial drug resistance in the malaria parasite - which infects about 20 million people, mostly children annually, and kills 700,000 of them.

Creationists also believe, contrary to the claim that humans have free will, that their god has a plan for each of us, so presumably planned to have those people die of malaria, and that to oppose their god's divine plan in any way is to oppose their god.

So, again a question I can never get a rational response to, is what should a true-believing creationist support - the god whom they believe creates parasites like malaria as part of its divine plan, or the biomedical scientists who work to thwart that plan?

This is of course, the sort of dilemmas that creationists need to avoid rather than have people accept that parasites like Plasmodium falciparum are the result of a mindless, amoral evolutionary process.

By contrast, and devoid of the sort of muddle, holding mutually exclusive views simultaneously, and dilemmas that creationism, with its evidence-free superstitions, gets itself into, the scientific view, supported by evidence, is:

Malevolent Designer News - 16 More Nasties For Devotees of the Divine Sadist To Enjoy

Figure 1.16 new species of endoparasitic wasps have been added to the group, Loboscelidia, based on their unique physical characteristics. Scale bar = 0.5 mmc

Credit: Yu Hisasue et al. (2023)
European Journal of Taxonomy

Male wasp of the Loboscelidia genus, a relative of the 16 newly-described Vietnamese species or endoparasitic wasps.

16 strange new parasitoid wasp species discovered in Vietnam | Research Results | KYUSHU UNIVERSITY

Creationist devotees of the divine sadist whom they believe creates all the parasites that increase the suffering in the world, will be thrilled to learn that 16 more endoparasitic wasps have been discovered.

These are all endoparasitic on other insects and lay their eggs inside their victims' eggs where their grubs can then consume the growing embryo. Their strange appearance is thought to be because they have evolved from a myrmecophilous species that mimicked the appearance or ants.

All these were discovered in Vietnam by entomologists from Kyushu University, Japan, and Vietnam’s National Museum of Nature. Their discovery is described in a Kyushu University news release:

Evolution in Progress - How The Different SARS-CoV-2 Variants Rise and Fall In The Population

I came across this the other day while perusing NHS information sources about COVID-19, which is now declining again in UK, having had a brief revival a few weeks ago. It's a chart showing how new variant rise to dominance in the viral population, to be replaced in their turn by newer variants.

Screen clip of page 16 of the National Influenza and COVID-19 surveillance report Week 45

This diagram only covers a year since November 2022.

This, in miniature, is exactly how new gene variants can rise in the species gene pool, depending on how advantageous they are compared to other variants. Some will increase rapidly to become the predominant form and may even stage something of a rally when in competition with a new variant. Some will linger on for a long time as a small proportion of the total, while others will become extinct, or very nearly extinct as newer variants enter the fray. What allows the new variants to increase as a proportion of the total is, of course, that it produces more copies of itself than its rivals do.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pestilential Sadist is Fighting Back Against Medical Science

Anopheles stephensi, spreading fast in Africa

Jim Gathany, Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons

Anopheles stephensi, already reached Ghana

First evidence of how the Asian malaria mosquito is spreading drug-resistant malaria in Africa - Lancaster University

You can never write Creationism's favourite sadist off in its battle to keep on killing children with its special tool, malaria. Just when you think medical science has it on the run and it looks possible that we could eradicate malaria like we did its other plaything, smallpox, it performs another twist of the arms race and redesigns the plasmodium parasite or a mosquito vector so they can evade our best efforts to protect children. And, pulling out all the stops, in this case, it's done both.

That's if you subscribe to the childish myth of a magic invisible designer creating all living things of course.

For normal people with a thinking ability above that of a slow 10-year-old, however, what we are seeing is an example of evolution by natural selection in response to an environment in which there are anti-malarial drugs and insecticides that kill mosquitoes.

Fact:
According to the WHO, there were an estimated 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021 with over 600,000 deaths, mostly in Africa. Children under 5 accounted for about 80% of all malaria deaths in the region.

Before creationists start trying to cover their embarrassment, and absolve their god of blame by citing something called 'Sin', which apparently changed from a verb to a noun, materialised as an entity capable of operating outside the control of their supposedly omnipotent god and began creating living things too, may I remind them of their intelligent [sic] design guru, Michael J Behe's contribution to this debate.

Behe wrote one of their sacred books, The Edge of Evolution in which he used faulty logic and bad maths to try to prove that malarial resistance in plasmodium falciparum was intelligently designed, in order to appeal to his largely scientifically illiterate and gullible target readership. His 'argument' was destroyed by biologist Kenneth Miller however, when he pointed out that Behe had assumed in his maths that several mutations had to occur in sequence in a single cell as a single event - something that no evolutionary biologist would ever suggest - an argument that appears to have gone way over the heads of Behe's adoring readership.

Behe's faulty logic was in presenting evolution as something so highly unlikely that no evolutionary biologist would offer it as the mechanism by which evolution happens, then base his maths on that faulty logic and, voila! dutifully show that it is so highly unlikely that it probably didn't happen - so God did it!

Apparently, if you start off with a mechanism for evolution that no biologist in their right mind would ever suggest, you can easily show that it couldn't happen. Creationists regard this as 'creation science'!

But, true to form, Behe has now saddled creationists with the problem of blaming 'Sin' for something that he says was created by their putative intelligent [sic] designer, but then believing two mutually exclusive things simultaneously has never been a problem for creationists.

And that makes it all the more difficult for creationists to wave aside the evidence of malevolent intent, if we stick to the creationist superstition for a moment, in the news published recently in Nature Medicine that an insecticide-resistant species of mosquito Anopheles stephensi, capable of spreading drug and diagnostic-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum, has spread from Asia to Africa via the Horn of Africa and has already caused a surge in cases of malaria in Ethiopia, and this species is spreading at a fast rate never before recorded for a mosquito, having already reached Ghana in Northwest Africa. The finding, by an international team which includes Dr Luigi Sedda, from the Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group at Lancaster University Medical School, Lancaster, UK, is outlined in a news release from Lancaster University:

Research by Lancaster University has led to the discovery of the role played by the Asian malaria mosquito (Anopheles stephensi) in the spread of drug and diagnosis-resistant malaria in Africa. Malaria is caused by a parasite which is spread by the bite of blood-sucking mosquitoes. According to the WHO, there were an estimated 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021 with over 600,000 deaths, mostly in Africa. Children under 5 accounted for about 80% of all malaria deaths in the region.

Following its first detection in Djibouti in 2012, the Asian malaria mosquito Anopheles stephensi spread to the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea) and beyond (Yemen, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana) at a speed unknown before for similar species.

People in households/dormitories with An. stephensi positivity had a 270% higher risk of malaria infection than those in households/dormitories where An. stephensi was not detected.

In addition, two other biological threats for the control of malaria were identified: drug resistance and diagnostic resistance of the parasite.

Dr Luigi Sedda, from the Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group at Lancaster Medical School, is a joint first author on the paper which is published in Nature Medicine.

This is a very important finding. The mosquito that has spread in the Horn of Africa from Asia drove a major urban malaria outbreak in Ethiopia. An. stephensi is posing important public health concerns due to the increase in geographical presence, the capacity to persist throughout the year and to resist current insecticides, and to transmit drug and diagnostic resistant parasites.

The epidemiological characteristics of An. stephensi driven malaria can challenge the expectations for the new malaria vaccines to reduce the burden of malaria disease and deaths in Africa, the continent that was already highly hit by malaria and where successes in malaria reduction are currently stalled.

Dr Luigi Sedda, co-first author
Lancaster Ecology and Epidemiology Group,
Lancaster Medical School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.

A water storage facility in a village in Ethiopia, a structure targeted by Anopheles stephensi

The capacity of Anopheles stephensi to use manmade water storage containers which are abundant in rapidly expanding African urban settings, coupled with its unique ecology, behavioural plasticity and resistance to major insecticides, makes it unamenable to conventional mosquito control tools. This latest evidence can change the prospects of malaria control and elimination in the face of any future intervention that ignores the presence of this invasive species.

The study was led by the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Ethiopia with the collaboration of Lancaster University (UK), the Adama Science and Technology University (Ethiopia); University of California, San Francisco (USA); The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK); Radboudumc University Medical Center (The Netherlands); U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (USA) and the Federal Ministry of Health (Ethiopia).

Well, you have to hand it to creationism's divine malevolence! Faced with the prospect of losing one of its best tools for killing innocent children and greatly increasing the suffering in the world, it has hit back hard and fast with a newly redesigned super mosquito to spread its newly-redesigned malaria parasites.

Of course, that's if you don't accept that evolution by natural selection is quite capable of producing this sort of response to anti-mosquito insecticides and anti-malaria drugs by the well-known evolutionary process biologists know as an evolutionary arms race - the antithesis of intelligent design.

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 Design - Another Dangerous Tick That Can Kill Cattle Is Spreading Fast

Nymph

Adult

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, (ventral view)

Photo: Risa Pesapane

An exotic tick that can kill cattle is spreading across Ohio

In what creationists should see as a triumph for their favourite sadist if they were true to their professed belief and weren't selective in its application, the Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis which they believe it designed, which feeds by sucking the blood of its victims and which was first detected in the USA in 2017 and in Ohio in 2021, is now present in such vast numbers that it is believed to have killed three cattle in southeastern Ohio, simply through blood loss.

One of the cattle was a healthy, 5-year-old bull. It would have taken about 10,000 ticks to kill it by exsanguination. that number of ticks were recovered in 90 minutes on one Ohio farm alone.

Ticks, like other parasites, if we accept the intelligent [sic] design argument for a moment, can only be ascribed to the work of a pestilential malevolence because creationists also insist that the putative designer is omnipotent and omniscience, therefore it knows exactly what its designs will do, and designs them to do exactly that.

And ticks appear to be designed to do only two things:

1. Produce more ticks.
2. Act as vectors for disease-causing organisms, in this case Anaplasma phagocytophilium and Theileria orientalis.

And, in a brilliant piece of malevolence, what gives these nasties their great power to spread and colonise new territories in vast numbers, all the adults are females that breed parthenogenically. In favourable conditions a newly-hatched tick can reach sexual maturity in a few weeks to a few months. Each female can lay up to 2,000 eggs which, if they all hatch and breed, will produce 4 million breeding ticks in two generations and 8 billion ticks in three, in favourable conditions.

As an introduced species in the USA, the Asian longhorned tick has few natural predators that can keep their numbers in check. In parts of their native range in Asia, guinea fowl are used to keep them in check, but the breeding rate of the tick is so high that natural predation has negligible impact on their numbers. This fantastic rate of reproduction means that a single female colonising a fresh territory can, if the conditions are right, produce tens of trillions of offspring within a year or two.

Creationism in Crisis - 160-Million-Year-Old Predatory Lampreys Makes Suckers of Creationists

Artist’s impression of Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes, one of two newly discovered species of flesh-eating lamprey found in 160-million-year-old rocks.

Heming Zhang

Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes (artist's impression)

Heming Zhang

Jawless ‘Bite’ from the Past: Jurassic Fossils Shed Light on Lamprey Evolution--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology

Way back in that long spell before 'Creation Week', the creation cult's date when the Universe was created, when 99.97% of Earth's history happened, there were two large, flesh-eating lampreys looking for victims to bore into. Unlike their blood-sucking modern relatives, which latch onto fish and suck their blood and body fluids, these ancient species probably ate the flesh of their victims.

These rare fossils were discovered in 160-million-year-old rocks in North China and are part of the Yanliao Biota, which is found in rock formations that are proving to be a valuable Lagerstätte.

Rosa Rubicondior, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, Chapter 4: Parasitic Vertebrates. pp. 106-107