Creationism in Crisis - So What 'Kind' is This Strange Thing?

Creationism in Crisis

So What 'Kind' is This Strange Thing?

George, Emma E., et al.(2023)

Evolutionary oddball has seven genomes inside a single cell | New Scientist

The Bible that creationists turn to for a source of scientific information, is of course, as hopelessly muddled and simplistic about biology as it is about cosmology, morality and medicine. For example, this is how it tries to classify the birds that it is forbidden to eat under the irrational food taboos it mandates for believers:

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, and the vulture, and the kite after his kind; every raven after his kind; and the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind; the little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant; and the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

Leviticus 11:13-19

Not surprisingly, and not just because of the hilarious gaff of including 'the bat' in a list of birds, and the muddle over the different 'kinds' of owl, biologists soon realised how hopelessly inadequate the Biblical notion of 'kinds' is as a means of classifying biological taxons, so had the devise the modern classification system.

And, presumably because the authors didn't realise that plants are alive because they don't breath like vertebrates do, there is no attempt to classify plants. In fact, the author's show their muddle over plants by this strange piece from Genesis:

Then God said, 'Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it. ' And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it.

Genesis 1:11-12

Clearly the Bible's authors thought there were only angiosperms (the most advances plants) since they are the only ones mentioned. Incidentally, more of their muddle is illustrated by the fact that this creation of green plants occurs before the sun is created, showing the authors knew nothing of photosynthesis.

And of course, there is no hint that the authors were even aware of single-celled micro-organisms, otherwise they might have mentioned germ theory, of which there is not a single word. Imaging how many lives could have been saved and how much suffering would have been avoided if God had thought to mention bacteria and viruses and how to avoid being infected by them, assuming it didn't know what it had created them for in the first place...

But that's an aside. The real muddle comes with the authors attempt to come up with a classification system, as Bible-literalist creationists assume that's what they were trying to do.

So, here is a curveball inadvertently thrown to creationists by researchers led by Emma E. George, now of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Integrative Oceanography Division, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, when working at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Her team have discovered single-celled algae that are not single organisms at all, but a complex community of seven different organisms, each with its own genome, and each playing a part in a complex relationship within the algal cell body.

Figure 3
Microscopy of Cryptomonas gyropyrenoidosa SAG 25.80 with bacterial endosymbionts.

(A) DIC; (B) DAPI; (C) FISH-M. polyxenophila probe; (D) FISH-G. numerosa probe; (E) overlay of (C) and (D); (F) endosymbionts clustered in the host cytoplasm, including endosymbionts with virus-like particles (Sv); (G) endosymbiont with virus-like particles within the bacterial cytoplasm and attached to the bacterial cell’s surface (arrowhead); and (H) bacterial endosymbionts and a membrane-like structure (i.e., putative autolysosome vacuole) that potentially contains virus-like particles (arrowhead). See also Figures S4A and S4C and Table S2.

George, Emma E., et al.(2023)

Creationism in Crisis - Feathered Dinosaurs Had Beetles Living on their Feathers Whose Descendants Now Live on Bird Feathers

Creationism in Crisis

Feathered Dinosaurs Had Beetles Living on their Feathers Whose Descendants Now Live on Bird Feathers

Remnants of dermestid beetle larvae and feathers in 130-million-year-old amber

Dermestid (larder) beetles

Fossils reveal a 100-million-year-old relationship between feathered dinosaurs and feather-feeding beetles | University of Oxford

Is there ever a day goes by when yet another science paper refutes creationism without even trying?

Well, maybe the odd public holiday when scientists take a day off from revealing the facts about the world, but refuting creationism is, and has always been, the incidental result of research into biology, archaeology and geology, and today is no exception.

For instance, we learn today that feathered dinosaurs not only existed 30 million years before birds evolved, but that those feathers were host to dermestid beetles, just as are modern bird feathers.

Dermestid beetles, also known as skin or hide beetles, are a type of beetle belonging to the family Dermestidae. They are found worldwide and are commonly associated with carcass decomposition, but they can also feed on a wide variety of organic material, including dried plant material, feathers, and even leather.

Dermestid beetles are known for their ability to efficiently clean carcasses of flesh, skin, and hair, making them popular among museums, taxidermists, and forensic scientists. The beetles are used to strip flesh and tissue from bones, leaving behind a clean and intact skeleton. This process is known as "dermestid beetle cleaning" or "dermestid beetle taxidermy."

According to a study published in the journal "Forensic Science International" in 2012, dermestid beetles are an effective tool for forensic entomologists in determining the post-mortem interval of human remains. The study found that the presence and activity of dermestid beetles on decomposing human remains can help estimate the time since death, particularly in cases where other insects are not present or are unable to colonize the body due to environmental conditions.

Dermestid beetles are also used in the field of zoology, where they are used to study the diet of animals. By analyzing the contents of dermestid beetle stomachs, researchers can learn about the types of animals a particular species preys upon.

In addition to their practical uses, dermestid beetles are also important ecologically. They play a role in the decomposition of dead animal matter and can help to recycle nutrients back into the ecosystem.

References:

1. "Dermestid Beetles." University of Florida Department of Entomology and Nematology,
   http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/beetles/dermestid_beetles.htm
2. "Forensic Entomology: Dermestid Beetles and Their Significance in Time of Death Estimation." Forensic Science International, vol. 219, no. 1-3, 2012, pp. 237-240., doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2011.12.026.
3. Gordon, Robert D., and Karen M. Hackbarth. "Dermestid Beetles as a Tool in Wildlife and Zooarchaeological Research." Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 26, no. 6, 1999, pp. 685-690., doi: 10.1006/jasc.1998.0307.

ChatGPT (21 Apr 2023) Tell me about dermestid beetles, please, with references. [Response to user question]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

Leaving aside the little problem for creationists that these beetles were getting trapped in amber some 300 million years before Earth was created according to the childish creationist fairy tales, this is also lovely evidence that the modern species of dermestid beetles co-evolved with their feathered hosts as the 'avian' dinosaurs evolved into birds.

The analogy is with human lice which co-evolved as the hominids diverged from the chimpanzees and gorillas, so there is now a clear evolutionary relationship between the lice that infect humans and the lice that infect the other African great apes.

Malevolent Design News - A New Batch of Tick-Borne, Malaria-Like Parasites is Spreading in USA

Malevolent Design News

A New Batch of Tick-Borne, Malaria-Like Parasites is Spreading in USA

The tick that spreads babesiosis is called Dermacentor albipictus. Photo shows female (left) and male adults.

Photo: U. Wisconsin/Susan Paskewitz)

Winter tick, Dermacentor albipictus

Credit: Mat Pound, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Bugwood.org

Researchers warn of tick-borne disease babesiosis | News

Creationism's divine malevolence has been busy creating more ways to make people sick, and very cleverly, it has included new classes of multigene families that enable it to evade the human immune system; the immune system the same designer allegedly designed to protect us from the parasites it creates to make us sick - if you believe in magic creation, that is.

The new batch of parasites are species of the genus Babesia which cause babesiosis in humans.

Babesiosis is a tick-borne parasitic infection caused by protozoa of the genus Babesia. It is considered an emerging disease and is most commonly found in the northeastern and upper midwestern regions of the United States. Babesiosis can range from a mild illness to a severe and life-threatening disease, particularly in people who are immunocompromised or have underlying health conditions.

Symptoms of babesiosis can include fever, fatigue, chills, sweating, headache, muscle aches, nausea, and vomiting. In severe cases, complications such as hemolytic anemia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and organ failure can occur. Babesiosis can also be asymptomatic or subclinical, especially in people with intact immune systems.

Diagnosis of babesiosis is usually made by detecting the parasites in a blood smear, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), or serological testing. Treatment typically involves a combination of antibiotics, such as atovaquone and azithromycin, or clindamycin and quinine, for a period of 7-10 days. In severe cases, hospitalization may be necessary for supportive care and close monitoring.

Prevention of babesiosis involves taking measures to avoid tick bites, such as wearing protective clothing, using insect repellent, and performing tick checks after being outdoors. Tick control measures, such as landscaping practices and the use of acaricides, can also be effective in reducing tick populations in endemic areas.

References:

1. Vannier E, Krause PJ. Human babesiosis. N Engl J Med. 2012;366(25):2397-2407. doi: 10.1056/NEJMra1202018
2. White DJ, Talarico J, Chang HG, et al. Human babesiosis in New York State: review of 139 hospitalized cases and analysis of prognostic factors. Arch Intern Med. 1998;158(19):2149-2154. doi: 10.1001/archinte.158.19.2149
3. Krause PJ, Gewurz BE, Hill D, et al. Persistent and relapsing babesiosis in immunocompromised patients. Clin Infect Dis. 2008;46(3):370-376. doi: 10.1086/525852

ChatGPT. (19 Apr 2023). Tell me what you know about babesiosis in humans, with references, please. [Response to a user question].
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

So far, the species which are known to cause babesiosis in humans are B. microti, B. duncani, and a B. divergens-like species.

Now a team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have succeeded in analyzing the genome of B. duncani and determined its 3D structure.

As the UCR news release explains:

Malevolent Design News - How Female African Monarch Butterflies Find a Mate Despite Most Males Being Killed By A Parasite

Malevolent Design News

How Female African Monarch Butterflies Find a Mate Despite Most Males Being Killed By A Parasite

African monarch's, Danaus chrysippus

Female butterflies breed despite male shortage - News

African monarch butterflies, Danaus chrysippus

arian.suresh - Flickr

Talk about pointlessness!

It seems creationism’s malevolent designer has gone to all the trouble of designing a parasite to kill most males of the African monarch butterfly, only to have the females find a way to mate with the few remaining males. So, either killing the males was just gratuitous cruelty, or the supposed designer, who also designed the females, didn't know what they were capable of.

That's if you've fallen for the childish notion of species being designed by a magic invisible skyman who allegedly knows everything and has limitless powers, that is.

If not, like to most normal adults, it should be obvious that this is the sort of thing a mindless natural process with no plan and no consciousness would produce. The parasite in question is a bacterium of the Spiroplasma genus, a genus which infects insects and often forms endosymbiotic relationships with them:

Spiroplasma is a genus of bacteria that is commonly found in insects, particularly in their hemolymph, salivary glands, and reproductive organs. Some species of Spiroplasma are known to form endosymbiotic relationships with their hosts and have been shown to play a role in the reproductive success, development, and even behavior of their insect hosts.

One well-known example of such an endosymbiotic relationship is between Spiroplasma and the African Monarch butterfly (Danaus chrysippus). Research has shown that Spiroplasma infection in this butterfly species can result in male-killing, where infected male larvae die before reaching adulthood, leaving a higher proportion of female butterflies in the population. This is thought to increase the reproductive success of female butterflies, as they face less competition for resources and mates.

Additionally, Spiroplasma infection has been shown to affect the coloration and pattern of African Monarch butterfly wings, with infected individuals exhibiting a higher degree of melanization and altered wing patterns. These changes in wing coloration and pattern are thought to affect the behavior and mating success of the infected butterflies.

References:

1. Hurst, G. D. D., Jiggins, F. M., & Pomiankowski, A. (2003). Evolutionary implications of symbiotic bacteria for host sex determination. Journal of evolutionary biology, 16(2), 175-182.
2. Hornett, E. A., Charlat, S., Duplouy, A., Davies, N., Roderick, G. K., Wedell, N., & Hurst, G. D. (2006). Evolution of male-killer suppression in a natural population. PLoS biology, 4(9), e283.
3. Oliver, K. M., & Russell, J. A. (2011). Moran, N. A. & Hunter, M. S. (2005). Costs and benefits of a superinfection of facultative symbionts in aphids. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 272(1561), 2187-2192.
4. Balenger, S. L., & Oberhauser, K. S. (2005). Effects of parasitic infection and melanization on wing morphogenesis in Danaus plexippus (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae). Journal of insect physiology, 51(2), 191-200.

ChatGPT. (18 Apr 2023). Tell me about the endosymbiont, Spiroplasma and African Monarch butterflies, with references, please. [Response to a user question].
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

This is an extreme example of what competition between sexes can produce. The female genes benefit from fewer males in the competition for resources and, so long as enough males survive to produce the next generation, there will be an evolutionary balance between virulence/infectivity and female reproductive success.

But, as some recent research shows, there has also been selection pressure on the females to find the few survivors of the symbiont's genocide. The work was carried out by scientists from the universities of Exeter, Rwanda and Edinburgh, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, who published their findings, open access in the journal Ecology & Evolution. The University of Exeter news release explains their work:

Creationism in Crisis - How Parasites Alter the Likelihood of Fish Being Caught by Anglers

Creationism in Crisis

How Parasites Alter the Likelihood of Fish Being Caught by Anglers

Creationism in Crisis

How Parasites Alter the Likelihood of Fish Being Caught by Anglers

Creationism in Crisis

How Parasites Alter the Likelihood of Fish Being Caught by Anglers

Parasites alter likelihood of fish being caught by anglers | Hokkaido University

A whitespotted char caught by angling during the survey

In a fascinating experiment in Japan, two scientists from Hokkaido University have shown a complex evolutionary relationship between parasitism and the likelihood of a fish being caught by an angler. And, as always with scientific evidence, it's not good news for Creationists.

No doubt though, they'll resort to their fall-back strategy of using their own definition of 'evolution' (one 'kind' turning into another, unrelated 'kind', in a single event), rather than the one science uses (change in allele frequency in a population over time).

But this is no so much about the sheer malevolence of any designer that could come up with parasites like this parasitic species of copepod which infects the mouth and gills of fish. Instead, it is about how parasitism, prey and predators are in a complex, dynamic evolutionary relationship which can only be understood and explained by reference to the basics of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Fishing has been practiced by humans for about 40,000 years, usually for food but latterly for sport. The functional difference being that fish caught for food are removed from the population as form of predation, whereas fish caught for sport are quickly released back into the wild.

The scientists conducted an elegant experiment consisting of two surveys:

Unintelligent Malevolence - The Ludicrous Complexity of Ams Races Between Parasites and Hosts

Unintelligent Malevolence

The Ludicrous Complexity of Arms Races Between Parasites and Hosts

Researchers from Penn Vet observed, for the first time, an intestinal pyogranuloma, formed in response to Yersinia infection. The organized grouping of cells includes monocytes (in green), neutrophils (in magenta), and Yersinia bacteria (in white), and depends on monocytes to form and to control infection, the team found.

Image: The Brodsky Laboratory

Peyer's Patches - organized lymphoid nodules commonly found in the small intestines.

By User:Plainpaper - File:Peyer's_patch.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The immune system does battle in the intestines to keep bacteria in check | Penn Today

Hard though it is to imagine any intelligent adult holding to such beliefs, Creationists believe that parasites were intelligently designed to make us sick and the same designer gave us an immune system to help stop parasites doing what it designed them to do. It then indulged in a pointless arms race with itself to try to make sure both parasites and our immune system did what they were designed to do.

It's as though the creator is some hate-filled but incompetent, schizophrenic amnesiac, intent on harming us one day and protecting us the next, but not remembering what it was trying to do yesterday and treating its solutions to problems yesterday as problems to be solved today, and no real idea about the basic principles of design.

Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) have discovered how this arms race has resulted in a continuous battle in or intestines between our immune system and bacteria if the Yersina genus which includes the plague organism, Y. pestis.

The setting for creationism's putative designer's ludicrous battle with itself is the host's intestines where the Yersinia organisms, which are designed to overcome the body's first line of defences, set up colonies in the lymph system. The lymph system's purpose is to protect us from these sorts of infections but the pathogens have been designed to use the system against us!

The body's response is to then try to seal in these colonies with a collection of immune cells to form a granuloma, sustained by monocytes.

The problem is this solution doesn't always work as designed and the granulomas break down when the monocytes fail to sustain them. The infection can ten enter the blood stream and cause serious illness.

The research and its significance is described in a news release from Penn Vet:

Yersinia bacteria cause a variety of human and animal diseases, the most notorious being the plague, caused by Yersinia pestis. A relative, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, causes gastrointestinal illness and is less deadly, but naturally infects both mice and humans, making it a useful model for studying its interactions with the immune system.

These two pathogens, as well as a third close cousin, Y. enterocolitica, which affects swine and can cause food-borne illness if people consume infected meat, have many traits in common, particularly their knack for interfering with the immune system’s ability to respond to infection.

The plague pathogen is blood-borne and transmitted by infected fleas. Infection with the other two depends on ingestion. Yet the focus of much of the work in the field had been on interactions of Yersinia with lymphoid tissues, rather than the intestine. A new study of Y. pseudotuberculosis led by a team from Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine and published in Nature Microbiology demonstrates that, in response to infection, the host immune system forms small, walled-off lesions in the intestines called granulomas. It’s the first time these organized collections of immune cells have been found in the intestines in response to Yersinia infections.

The team went on to show that monocytes, a type of immune cell, sustain these granulomas. Without them, the granulomas deteriorated, allowing the mice to be overtaken by Yersinia.

Our data reveal a previously unappreciated site where Yersinia can colonize and the immune system is engaged. These granulomas form in order to control the bacterial infection in the intestines. And we show that if they don’t form or fail to be maintained, the bacteria are able to overcome the control of the immune system and cause greater systemic infection.

In all three Yersinia infections, a hallmark is that they colonize lymphoid tissues and are able to escape immune control and replicate, cause disease, and spread.

Because it’s an orally acquired pathogen, we were interested in how the bacteria behaved in the intestines. Daniel [Sorobetea, first-author] made this initial observation that, following Yersinia pseudotuberculosis infection, there were macroscopically visible lesions all along the length of the gut that had never been described before.

We hypothesize that it’s a general role for the monocytes in other tissues as well.

Previous to this study we knew of Peyer’s patches to be the primary site where the body interacts with the outside environment through the mucosal tissue of the intestines.

These therapies have caused an explosion of excitement in the cancer field, the idea of reinvigorating the immune system. Conceptually we can also think about how to coax the immune system to be reinvigorated to attack pathogens in these settings of chronic infection as well.

Professor Igor E. Brodsky, senior author
Robert R. Marshak Professor and chair of the Department of Pathobiology
University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Pennsylvania, USA.

The findings have implications for developing new therapies that leverage the host immune system, Brodsky says. A drug that harnessed the power of immune cells to not only keep Yersinia in check but to overcome its defenses, they say, could potentially eliminate the pathogen altogether.

A novel battlefield


Y. pestis, Y. pseudotuberculosis, and Y. enterocolitica share a keen ability to evade immune detection.

Earlier studies had shown that Yersinia prompted the formation of granulomas in the lymph nodes and spleen but had never observed them in the intestines until Daniel Sorobetea, a research fellow in Brodsky’s group, took a closer look at the intestines of mice infected with Y. pseudotuberculosis.

The research team, including Sorobetea and later Rina Matsuda, a doctoral student in the lab, saw that these same lesions were present when mice were infected with Y. enterocolitica, forming within five days after an infection.

A biopsy of the intestinal tissues confirmed that the lesions were a type of granuloma, known as a pyogranuloma, composed of a variety of immune cells, including monocytes and neutrophils, another type of white blood cell that is part of the body's front line in fighting bacteria and viruses.

Granulomas form in other diseases that involve chronic infection, including tuberculosis, for which Y. pseudotuberculosis is named. Somewhat paradoxically, these granulomas—while key in controlling infection by walling off the infectious agent—also sustain a population of the pathogen within those walls.

The team wanted to understand how these granulomas were both formed and maintained, working with mice lacking monocytes as well as animals treated with an antibody that depletes monocytes. In the animals lacking monocytes “these granulomas, with their distinct architecture, wouldn’t form,” Brodsky says.

Instead, a more disorganized and necrotic abscess developed, neutrophils failed to be activated, and the mice were less able to control the invading bacteria. These animals experienced higher levels of bacteria in their intestines and succumbed to their infections.

Groundwork for the future

The researchers believe the monocytes are responsible for recruiting neutrophils to the site of infection and thus launching the formation of the granuloma, helping to control the bacteria. This leading role for monocytes may exist beyond the intestines, the researchers believe.

But the discoveries also point to the intestines as a key site of engagement between the immune system and Yersinia.

Peyer’s patches are small areas of lymphoid tissue present in the intestines that serve to regulate the microbiome and fend off infection.

In future work, Brodsky and colleagues hope to continue to piece together the mechanism by which monocytes and neutrophils contain the bacteria, an effort they’re pursing in collaboration with Sunny Shin’s lab in the Perelman School of Medicine’s microbiology department.

A deeper understanding of the molecular pathways that regulate this immune response could one day offer inroads into host-directed immune therapies, by which a drug could tip the scales in favor of the host immune system, unleashing its might to fully eradicate the bacteria rather than simply corralling them in granulomas.

Regrettably, the team's research paper in Nature Microbiology is behind a paywall:

Abstract Granulomas are organized immune cell aggregates formed in response to chronic infection or antigen persistence. The bacterial pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis (Yp) blocks innate inflammatory signalling and immune defence, inducing neutrophil-rich pyogranulomas (PGs) within lymphoid tissues. Here we uncover that Yp also triggers PG formation within the murine intestinal mucosa. Mice lacking circulating monocytes fail to form defined PGs, have defects in neutrophil activation and succumb to Yp infection. Yersinia lacking virulence factors that target actin polymerization to block phagocytosis and reactive oxygen burst do not induce PGs, indicating that intestinal PGs form in response to Yp disruption of cytoskeletal dynamics. Notably, mutation of the virulence factor YopH restores PG formation and control of Yp in mice lacking circulating monocytes, demonstrating that monocytes override YopH-dependent blockade of innate immune defence. This work reveals an unappreciated site of Yersinia intestinal invasion and defines host and pathogen drivers of intestinal granuloma formation.

Sorobetea, Daniel; Matsuda, Rina; Peterson, Stefan T.; Grayczyk, James P.; Rao, Indira; Krespan, Elise; Lanza, Matthew; Assenmacher, Charles-Antoine; Mack, Matthias; Beiting, Daniel P.; Radaelli, Enrico; Brodsky, Igor E.
Inflammatory monocytes promote granuloma control of Yersinia infection
Nature Microbiology (2023); DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01338-6

© 2023 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

I doubt that any Creationist would have the courage to read this far, but this offer is open to any who do: Please explain how this system can be regarded as the work of an omnibenevolent, omniscience, intelligent designer and not the work of either an incompetent malevolence or the result of amoral, utilitarian natural processes operating without a plan.

Creationism in Crisis - How Malaria is Evolving in Humans and Our Closest Ape Relatives

Creationism in Crisis

How Malaria is Evolving in Humans and Our Closest Ape Relatives

Bonobo, Pan paniscus

Photo: Sean M. Lee

Bonobo gently cradling a young mongoose

Malaria infection harms wild African apes - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis

The embarrassing lack of scientific research support for Creationism continues with the publication of yet another paper that utterly refutes it and exposes the fraudulent nature of the cult's claims.

Researchers led by assistant professor Emily, E. Wroblewski of Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA, have found that the closest relative of humans, the bonobo, Pan paniscus, not only suffers from malaria parasites closely related to the that infect humans - Plasmodium falciparum - but that the pattern of immunity is related to the prevalence of infections, similar to the pattern found in humans. This shows that infections can be severe enough in bonobos to reduce fitness to survive and reproduce. Natural selection, as in humans, has led to an increase in genes for immunity in bonobo populations subject to parasitism by the organisms.

The scientists have discovered that bonobo populations differ in a key immune trait depending on the presence of malaria infection. Infected populations have a higher frequency of an immune variant that protects against developing severe disease, a pattern that mirrors what is observed among human populations.

Because of the difficulty in monitoring wild bonobos and particularly in obtaining blood samples to analyse for malaria parasites and bonobo DNA, the team used the ingenious method o c collecting fecal samples which contain both the parasite and bonobo DNA.

The research and its significance is explained in a Washington University in St Louis news release:

Unintelligent Designer News - The Hopeless Muddle When the Intelligent [sic] Designer Doesn't Have a Plan

Unintelligent Designer News

The Hopeless Muddle When the Intelligent [sic] Designer Doesn't Have a Plan

European Spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus

Source: Wikipedia
By Gilles San Martin - Flickr - Ips typographus
(CC BY-SA 2.0), Link

Bark Beetle galleries in wood.

Photo: Deborah Bell, Smithsonian Institution.

Symbiotic fungi transform terpenes from spruce resin into attractants for bark beetles | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Whatever designed the symbiotic relationship between the European spruce bark beetle Ips typographus, the various fungi it depends on and Spruce trees, is either incompetent, severely amnesiac, or deliberately malevolent.

Briefly, the beetle grubs depend on the fungus to kill and breakdown the tissues of the spruce tree in which they live and develop into mature adults and the fungus gets carried to new trees by the beetles when they disperse. For this relationship to work, the adult beetles need to be directed to suitable new host spruces. This is achieved by the fungus producing attractive chemical known as terpenes which are detected by the beetles with a special olfactory organ. Not only that but research has shown that the fungi also produce chemicals that stimulate the beetles to burrow into the bark of the spruce hosts, so starting the infection and killing process.

All very brilliant and a triumph of 'designed', as no doubt the average Creationist will claim, even claiming that this system must have been created as a whole system, which is nonsensical, of course, as every component could have evolved gradually over time with each generation improving on the previous one, either in the sensitivity of the beetles' olfactory organ, the attractiveness of the chemicals the fungi produce or the dependence on each other for feeding and dispersal.

However, where the incompetence or malevolence of the 'designer' created by comes in is in the way the attractive chemicals are created by the fungus. A recent piece of research led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany, has shown that the fungus uses a substance produced by the spruce tree to defend itself against fungal attack!

And it gets even more complicated because some species fungi are harmful to the beetles, so the beetles have evolved the ability to distinguish between the chemicals produced by symbiont species and ignore those produced by harmful species.

Let's just run through the logic of Creationist claims of intelligent [sic] design shown here:

Malevolent Designer News: Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Such a Fun Guy!

Malevolent Designer News

Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Such a Fun Guy!

Candida auris

Before The Last of Us, I was part of an international team to chart the threat of killer fungi. This is what we found

Candida auris

On top of the treat from Marburg, highlighted in my last blog post, scientists have also identified a potential threat from deadly fungal infections which are on the rise.

Could it be that Creationism's divine malevolence is intelligently designing a fungus with which to attack humans, building on the success it has had with a fungus to attack and exterminate frogs, news and other amphibians - a problem I have written about extensively both in this blog and in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

This threat to human health is the subject of an article in The Conversation by Justin Beardsley, Associate Professor in Infectious Diseases, Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases, Westmead Clinical School, University of Sydney, Australia. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Creationsm in Crisis - How A New Plant Species Evolved

Ethereal color variant of mysterious plant is actually a new species | Research at Kobe

Figure 1. Morphological comparison of the aboveground parts of M. kirishimense and M. humile:
(a-c) M. kirishimense, (d-e) M. humile, (f). M. humile f. roseum (color variant of M. humile). The arrowheads indicate spreading sepals.

Photographed by Masayuki Sato (a), Katsumi Iwahori (b), Shuichi Kurogi (c), Shin Terui (d), Kazushige Uemori (e), and Kenji Suetsugu (f).

Giving the lie yet again to Creationists' absurd claim that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is being increasingly rejected by mainstream scientists and is about to become the first scientific theory to be replaced by a superstition based on magic and an unproven supernatural entity, Bronze Age Creationism, scientists in Japan have discovered that what was thought to be a colour variant of a parasitic plant, is in fact a new species. They have suggested how this new species could have evolved from the parent species.

The new species is the rosy pink form of the parasitic plant known to science as Monotropastrum humile. These plants as found throughout the woods of East and Southeast Asia and have lost their ability to photosynthesise, depending instead on the hyphae of soil fungi which are themselves in a symbiotic relationship with other plants. These soil fungi connect to the roots of other plants and help breakdown organic molecules in the soil into nutrients the plans can use. In return the plants supply the fungi with the sugars they produce in their leaves. Monotropastrum humile however, is a free loader on this system and not only takes the nutrients but also the sugars, while giving nothing in return.

But it's not this parasitic relationship which is under consideration here, but the newly-discovered status of the rosy pink form, which close examination and 20 years of study have shown to be a different species. The Kobe University scientists who identified it as a new species have named it M. kirishimense, after Kirishima, in Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, where it was first found growing.

From the Kobe University news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationists' Favourite Sadist Kills Its Victims With Plague

Oropsylla montana (a ground squirrel flea) infected and blocked with Yersinia pestis

Mitchell et al, (CC-BY 4.0)

Creationism's divine malevolence is now using the microorganism, Yersinia pestis, with which it killed 30%-60% of European humans and 75-200 million humans worldwide between 1346 and 1353, to have periodic bouts of killing rodents such as rats, mice, gerbils, squirrels, marmots and prairie dogs.

Wikipedia - Black death.

Having created these rodents, according to Creationists, it then designed Yersinia pestis to kill them, using different species of flea as vectors to make sure the plague spreads quickly and widely.

Now scientists have worked out why it changes periodically from an enzootic to an epizootic disease. It's all down to what happens in the gut of infected fleas which spread the disease. They have published their findings today in the open access journal, PLOS Pathogens.

According to information provided ahead of publication:

A Creationist Nightmare Plant - Malevolent Design AND Evolution by Loss of Genes and Complexity

Geosiris australiensis

Source: Grey & Lee (2017)

Geosiris is an early contender for Sexiest Plant of 2019

Readers may remember how I recently described one of the most important symbiotic relationships on Earth - that between trees and fungi - as a classic example of how cooperation can evolve by the interaction of 'selfish' genes with other genes in their environment.

Creationists looking at that same relationship will insist that it is evidence of intelligent [sic] design, without ever providing evidence that such a designer entity has ever existed, any plausible mechanism by which it could have arisen without a designer, or a single, authenticated example of it ever having made chemistry and/or physics do something they couldn’t do without it.

Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings of their superstition, which means it isn't even a theory in the scientific sense, it satisfies their desire for easy answers, conforms with what their mummy and daddy believed, and avoids all that tiresome learning. Their conclusion is, therefore, that it must be true because it passes their "What do I want to be true?" test.

This article then will spoil that smugly self-satisfying conclusion on at least three counts:

1. It shows any designer of this example to be a malevolent cheat who favours free-loading parasites.
2. It involves evolution by loss of genes - something Creationist dogma claims is impossible in the erroneous belief that loss of information and loss of complexity are always deleterious, even though they are commonplace in successful parasites.
3. It involves plate tectonics and an old Earth to explain how this example from Australia is related to species from Madagascar and the Comoro Islands.

The one crumb of comfort for Creationists is that it involves free-loading in a cooperative relationship - something they claim means cooperative behaviour can't evolved by 'selfish' genes because any such relationship will always degenerate due to selfish freeloaders always having an advantage. An argument that is manifestly untrue because so many cooperative relationships exist in nature and any examples such as this, of freeloading, are numerically small compared to the very many which work. The evolutionary explanation is relatively simple - freeloading will provoke resistance which will reduce the benefits of freeloading, whereas cooperation will always improve since both parties benefit.

Those Creationists who are afraid of even considering whether they could be wrong in case they upset an invisible, mind-reading, magic sky man, should probably stop reading now.

The following article by Elizabeth Joyce of James Cook University, Australia, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, concerns a recently-discovered Australian parasitic plant that freeloads on the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants by stealing the nutrients from the photosynthetic plant but giving nothing back. The original article can be read here:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks Are Designed to Make Us Sick

European tick, Ixodes ricinus

Study demonstrates for the first time that ticks weaken skin's immune response

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not a fanatical perfectionist for whom no detail is too small in its quest to find ways to make its creation sick - or so you must believe if you've fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax.

Here for example is a paper in which the scientists have shown how well-designed ticks are for passing on infections to its victims, including humans and our livestock. The scientists found that tick saliva contains a powerful immuno-suppressant the prevent the body from reacting to the nasty little organisms it injects along with its saliva when it takes a meal. This also solves the mystery of why ticks are such powerful disease vectors. It almost seems they were designed for it.

The team of scientists led by led by Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases) in collaboration with the research group of Hannes Stockinger (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna) have published their paper, open access, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The Medical University of Vienna news release, explains the research and its significance:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Made Tsetse Flies to Pass on Sleeping Sickness

African Sleeping Sickness Microscopic African trypanosomes (left), the parasites that cause African sleeping sickness, are spread by the bite of the tsetse fly (right).

Photo by Nikolay Kolev (left) and Geoffrey Attardo (right)

African sleeping sickness: How the pathogen colonizes t … - LMU Munich

This news item should please devotees of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer, if for no other reason than that it involves a flagellum. Those who fell for Michael J Behe's opening ploy in his intelligent design hoax were fooled into believing that a flagellum is an irreducibly complex structure so must have been designed by an intelligent designer because it could not have evolved by Darwinian gradual evolution.

Of course, Behe ignored the fact that the component parts of the flagellar proton motor pre-existed the flagellum, in the Type II Secretion System, which was a development of the proton pump, so all that was needed was for them to be exapted for a different function, and to give the organism an advantage. It also ignores the fact that there are lots of different flagella found in nature, some with even fewer components than those of E. coli, which he had claimed was the minimum necessary for a functional flagellum. Clearly, if other flagella can work with less components, that of E. Coli is not irreducibly complex

Wikepedia - Type II secretion system

And, unwittingly, Behe gave us the idea of a malevolent designer, because E. coli is much better at making us sick because it has a flagellum, than it would be without it. Given that Creationists believe their putative designer is omniscient, it must have been aware of that when it designed the flagellum.

Anyway, no matter how comprehensively the hoax is refuted, or how malevolent it makes their favourite god look, Creationists will ignore the science and stick with the refuted notion, so those are the people who should be thrilled by this discovery. It is the discovery that the trypanosomes carried by the tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness in humans and debilitating diseases in cattle and horses, has a flagellum specially designed to enable the tsetse fly to pass it on in its saliva when it takes a blood meal.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Spreading Rat Lung Worms To Humans

Platydemus manokwari, an introduced flatworm present in Hawai‘i, which can act as a paratenic host of the rat lungworm parasite and that has been implicated in causing rat lungworm disease in Okinawa.

Credit: Shinji Sugiura.

Slugs, snails are not alone in causing rat lungworm disease in humans | SOEST

These days, I seem to be constantly reporting on yet another way Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer has found to make us sick and generally cause an increase in the suffering in the world - if you believe the Creationist disinformation about biology.

Here we have yet another example.

As though the rat lungworm, Angiostrongylus cantonensis, wasn't nasty enough, especially when it infects humans and destroys the brain, the divine malevolence has been busy finding new ways to make sure humans become infected with this nasty little nematode, as reported by researchers from the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA and the Royal Veterinary College, London, UK, who combed through nearly 140 scientific studies to show that slugs and snails are far from being the only possible vectors of the disease.

These so-called, paratenic hosts include 32 species of freshwater prawns/shrimp, crayfish, crabs, flatworms, fish, sea snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, centipedes, cattle and pigs. Of these, at least 13 species of prawns/shrimp, crabs, flatworms, fish, frogs, toads, lizards, and centipedes have been associated with causing rat lungworm disease in humans.

Although these paratenic hosts can become infected, the parasites remain in their immature form until eaten by a rodent, when they mature. If one of these paratenic hosts or an intermediate host such as a slug or snail is ingested by a human, the parasite continues to develop but only up to a point. That point is when they are in the person's brain, moving around and feeding on brain cells, then they die. The resulting brain damage and inflammation as the immune systems tries to cope with the dead worms is the cause of the symptoms of rat lung worm disease. Not usually fatal, but the process and debility it causes can be prolonged.

Here is what the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has to say about it:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Fools a Fly

Zombie fly fungus lures healthy male flies to mate with female corpses – University of Copenhagen

A male fly trying to mate with a female corpse held in place by a dab of Vaseline. The fungus has grown out of the rear body segment and is visible as large white patches from which spores are ejected

Credit: Filippo Castelucci

I describe several examples of these parasitic fungi taking control of their hosts and turning them into zombies in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good. While this example might not be the most horrific, it is certainly up there amongst the top few.

It is the fungus known to science as Entomophthora muscae which not only takes control of the female fly it parasitizes, but then uses her dead body to release powerful pheromones that take control of males, forcing them to try to mate with the dead female, so it can spread the fungal spores to a living female.

Malevolent Designer News - The SARS-CoV-2 Virus is a Sophisticated Design For Increasing Suffering

Illustration of a SARS-CoV-2 viral particle entering a cell. The particle pierces through a cell’s membrane, made of two layers of lipids. A PNNL-OHSU team has shown how lipids are key to the ability of the virus to replicate.

Illustration: Michael Perkins | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

COVID-19 Fattens Up Our Body’s Cells to Fuel Its Viral Takeover | PNNL

Creationist mode:

No doubt the more they learn about the SARS-CoV-2 which is causing the current COVID-19 pandemic, the more creationists will come to admire the sheer brilliance of the divine malevolence they believe created it for the sole purpose of killing millions of people and making hundreds of millions sicker, to generally increase the suffering in the world. At least that's what it achieved and is still achieving so, since it is supposedly omniscient, we have to believe it knew precisely what it would do and designed it for that purpose.

Now a group of scientists has discovered yet another example of just what a brilliantly sophisticated machine for making us sick this nasty little virus is. They have found that it

undertakes a massive takeover of the body’s fat-processing system, creating cellular storehouses of fat that empower the virus to hijack the body’s molecular machinery and cause disease.

but before creationists get too excited, the scientists from Oregon Health & Science University and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory caution that these results were obtained from cell cultures, not living humans, so must be treated with caution pending more research. Nevertheless, what they found should be enough to impress devotees of the malevolence that they believe designed this virus.

The news release from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory explains:

Malevolent Designer News - What a Devilishly Good Job Creationism's Divine Malevolence Made of Malaria!

This false-colored electron micrograph shows a sporozoite of Plasmodium bergei migrating through the cytoplasm of midgut epithelia of an Anopheles stephensi mosquito.

© Ute Frevert/Margaret Shear/Wikipedia

Why vaccination against malaria quickly loses its protective effect

Scientists in Germany have worked out why immunity to malaria is not very effective and has a very short duration.

Malaria is one of the world's biggest killers. It is caused by a number of different, closely related Plasmodium parasites, normally transmitted by Anopheles mosquitos. The commonest parasite is Plasmodium falciparum and the most efficient vector is Anopheles gambiae. According to the US Center for Disease Control (CDC):

Malaria is one of the most severe public health problems worldwide. It is a leading cause of death and disease in many developing countries, where young children and pregnant women are the groups most affected. According to the 2021 World Malaria Report:

• Nearly half the world’s population lives in areas at risk of malaria transmission in 87 countries and territories.
• In 2020, malaria caused an estimated 241 million clinical episodes, and 627,000 deaths. An estimated 95% of deaths in 2020 were in the WHO African Region.

Now Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) who studied the human immune response after immunization with the malaria pathogen Plasmodium falciparum have discovered that the immune response has a very short duration. They concluded:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Divine Malevolence Excels Itself With Toxoplasmosis

Toxoplasma gondii

Shutterstock

I thought devotees of creationism's malevolent designer might like to read about an astonishingly successful organism it allegedly created. It is the organism known to medical science and biology as Toxoplasma gondii, the organism responsible for the disease, toxoplasmosis.

According to the WHO over 1 million people in the European area alone become infected by it and, according to Professor Justine R. Smith, Professor of Eye & Vision Health, Flinders University, Australia and Assistant professor João M. Furtado, Assistant professor of Ophthalmology, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, writing in The Conversation, 30%-50% of the world's population could be infected by it, making it the most successful pathological organism known. Once infected a person carries it for life and it is one of the most zoonotic organisms, capable of infected almost any animal or bird.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Made a Parasite Better at Killing Children

The Kissing bug, Triatom infestans,
The main vector for Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease.

Hybrid strains make insidious parasite more dangerous | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

Creationist mode:

If you’re a divine malevolence and have gone to all the trouble to design a blood-born parasite like the trypanosome, Trypanosoma cruzi, especially for making people sick and die, and have even created a special means of passing it from one person to another to make sure as many people suffer as possible, such as the 'kissing bug', Triatom infestans, you're not going to just stand by and allow a potential victim's immune system (that you designed to protect them from your parasites), stop the trypanosome from doing its job and making them sick, are you?

Of course not!

Trypanosoma cruzi, the organism that causes Chagas disease

Credit: CDC/Dr. Myron G. Schultz

As we have seen before, most of these nasty little organisms that creationists believe were created by their favourite god, have been designed to evade or even suppress their host's immune system so they can make life as miserable, or as short, as possible.

A good example of this, and an example of the inventive genius of anything that designed it, is in fact Trypanosoma cruzi, the microorganism that causes Chagas disease, which affects millions of people in Central and South America, causing thousands of deaths every year. Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, have discovered just how brilliantly this parasite has been designed so it can continue to do what it was designed to do. They have shown that it can form new variants from hybrids of different strains that are often better at circumventing the immune system and causing disease.

As the Karolinska Institutet news item announcing the team's publication of their findings in the online journal, eLife, explains: