Refuting Creationism - How Consciousness Emerges From An Unconscious Brain - No Magic Required

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Researchers discover advanced language processing in the unconscious human brain | BCM

One of the more persistent claims made by creationists, especially those who have learned that “irreducible complexity” and “no transitional fossils” are not arguments so much as slogans, is that science can never explain consciousness. Consciousness, we are assured, is something special, something non-material, something breathed into us by a creator god; the magical ingredient that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and places us conveniently at the centre of creation.

It is, of course, another argument from ignorance: science has not yet explained every detail of consciousness, therefore God. The same argument was once used for lightning, disease, embryology, instinct, inheritance, morality and the origin of species. In each case, the alleged supernatural mystery retreated as evidence accumulated and natural mechanisms were discovered. Consciousness is now going the same way — not because science has solved every philosophical puzzle about subjective experience, but because neuroscience is steadily showing that the mental processes creationists like to wrap in mystery are ordinary biological processes carried out by ordinary neural tissue.

A striking example of that comes from a paper published in Nature by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions. The researchers recorded activity from neurons in the human hippocampus while patients were under general anaesthesia during surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy. This gave them a rare opportunity to observe what the brain was doing when the patients were, in the ordinary sense, unconscious.

What they found is deeply inconvenient for anyone who wants consciousness to remain a supernatural mystery. Even under anaesthesia, hippocampal neurons responded to unexpected sounds, showed evidence of short-term plasticity, and, most remarkably, processed spoken language. When patients were played short stories, neural activity in the hippocampus carried information about word frequency, semantic category and grammatical class, and even contained signals predictive of upcoming words.

In other words, processes we might once have assumed belonged to conscious awareness — distinguishing parts of speech, extracting meaning and anticipating what comes next in a sentence — were taking place without the patient being aware of them. The brain was not merely ticking over like an idling machine; it was analysing, categorising and predicting. Consciousness, then, is not where all the clever work is done. Much of the clever work appears to be done before consciousness ever gets involved.

That does not mean this paper has “solved” consciousness, nor do the authors claim that it has. What it does show is that the boundary between conscious and unconscious processing is not where many people intuitively imagine it to be. Consciousness is looking less like a magic light switched on by a soul, and more like a higher-level state arising from coordinated activity across brain systems — a state in which some of the brain’s processing becomes integrated, reportable and available to the organism as experience.

For creationists, that is the problem. Their argument depends on consciousness remaining mysterious enough to hide a god in it. But neuroscience keeps doing what science always does: replacing mystery with mechanism, awe with understanding, and supernatural assertion with testable evidence. Once again, the choice is not between “science knows everything” and “therefore God”; it is between a research programme that discovers how things work and a religious apologetic that depends on hoping we never find out.

Unintelligent Design - The DNA In A Developing Brain Gets Broken And Has To Be Repaired - Incompetent Design Or Evolution?

Neurons migrating through dense tissue in the developing brain (green) frequently undergo DNA damage (magenta).

DNA in neurons is damaged and repaired during brain cortex formation | News | Kyoto University iCeMS

Like my last post, this post illustrates how the human body, far from being the perfect design of the omnipotent, omniscient designer creationists would have us believe in, is the result of a utilitarian evolutionary process. Layers of complexity arise, not from divine brilliance, but from evolved solutions to problems created by suboptimal earlier solutions to other problems — which were themselves the result of imperfect evolution.

In the previous post we saw how DNA replication is sufficiently imperfect that it requires mechanisms to repair the resulting DNA damage. However, these repair processes are themselves potentially dangerous and need control systems to maintain a careful balance between too little and too much repair. When this control process fails, it can lead to cancers that mimic those caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

In this post we see how newborn neurons in the developing brain need to squeeze through tight spaces in dense tissue, past other cells and between fibres, in order to reach their final positions and form neural circuits in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices. This process is such a physical struggle that the DNA in these neurons can suffer double-strand breaks and must be repaired quickly to ensure normal brain development. This is the finding of a research team from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, Osaka University, the National University of Singapore and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, led by Professor Mineko Kengaku who have just published their findings in Nature.

Mostly, this repair is quick and successful. However, the research team also found striking similarities between the development of mice in which the repair process failed and human genome-instability syndromes that affect the cerebellum.

Another important point is that this repair process appears to be much more successful in damaged neuronal DNA than in similar damage that can occur when some cancer cells migrate through narrow channels. The difference seems to lie in where the DNA breaks occur. In neurons, they tend to occur in regions of the genome that are not actively being transcribed, whereas in cancer cells the damage can involve essential genes. That suggests there is some biological bias in where these breaks occur in neurons, rather than the process being simply random mechanical shattering.

This raises the obvious question for creationists: why create a process that breaks DNA in developing brain cells, only to require another process to repair it, with the inherent risk that the repair process might be incomplete or imperfect? It also raises the possibility that the resulting small differences in the genomes of individual neurons could contribute to neuronal individuality and perhaps to some neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

The emerging picture, from this and from the rogue repair-control process that can mimic cancers caused by the BRCA genes, is not of a human body designed by an omniscient engineer. It is more like a William Heath Robinson contraption: improvised, overcomplicated, dependent on compensatory mechanisms, and always vulnerable to the failure of the very systems needed to keep it working.

Refuting Creationism - How The Centromere Evolved

Abstract digital DNA Helix. Purple elements represent evolutionary changes in DNA.

AI-generated image

26-02-19Uncovering evolution at the center of cell division | Max Planck Institute

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A paper recently published in Nature by a research team led by Andrea Musacchio, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, and Jef Boeke from the NYU Grossmann School of Medicine, refutes a number of creationism's sacred dogmas. It shows how evolution at the cellular level progresses through intermediate stages and how new genetic information can arise and be repurposed. It also shows how complex specified information can evolve naturally by a Darwinian process.

The paper goes some way towards solving the ‘centromere paradox’. This is the observation that although the mechanism of cell replication, which is common to all eukaryotic cells, is highly conserved, the centromere — the specialised point on a chromosome to which proteins attach and pull the chromosomes apart during cell division — appears to mutate freely. This results in a wide variety of centromeres, ranging from large, repeat-rich centromeres in some species to the tiny, minimalist ‘point centromeres’ of yeast.

The team showed that the tiny centromere in yeast evolved through intermediate stages and began as a ‘jumping gene’, or retrotransposon — an essentially parasitic chunk of DNA that can relocate within a chromosome, thereby creating new genetic material. In yeast, this appears to have been repurposed by evolution to create the precise minimalist centromere — an example of what William A. Dembski would call complex specified information and designate as evidence for a creator.

Malevolent Design - Why Autism Refutes Intelligent Design - Or Is the Designer Incompetent?

Evolution's well-tinkered machine.

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Autism Research Breakthrough Discovered by Hebrew University Researchers | en.new.huji

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have uncovered a mechanism that leads to autism. If this is the product of intelligent design then the designer is either incompetent or malevolent, but as so often with diseases that arise when systems go wrong, it is exactly what we expect of an evolved process. Their paper has just been published open access in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

For proponents of Intelligent Design such as Michael Behe and William Dembski, biological systems are supposed to bear the hallmarks of careful engineering — intricate machines whose parts work together with purpose and precision. But the mechanism uncovered in this study looks nothing like the output of a competent engineer. Instead, it reveals a fragile regulatory network in which a single biochemical modification destabilises a key control protein and sends an entire signalling pathway out of balance. The result is a cascade of downstream effects that ultimately alters brain development and behaviour.

What the researchers have uncovered is not a piece of irreducibly complex machinery but a regulatory system that can be knocked off course by a small perturbation. Nitric-oxide signalling modifies the protein TSC2, leading to its degradation and the subsequent overactivation of the mTOR pathway — a pathway that controls cellular growth and protein synthesis throughout the body. In other words, the pathology arises because a normal biological control system fails to maintain the delicate balance on which it depends.

This is precisely the sort of vulnerability we expect from systems produced by evolution. Evolution does not design organisms from scratch with perfect foresight; it works with what already exists, modifying and repurposing pathways that originally evolved for other purposes. The result is a network of interacting components that usually works well enough to keep organisms alive and reproducing, but which inevitably contains points where the system can fail. When those failures occur, the consequences can be severe.

Far from supporting Intelligent Design, discoveries like this highlight the jury-rigged nature of biological systems. They show that life’s complexity arises not from optimal engineering but from the gradual accumulation of workable solutions over evolutionary time — solutions that function most of the time, yet remain vulnerable to the occasional catastrophic malfunction.

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Cancer - Or Was It Malevolent Design?

Graphical abstract

Scientists find cancer weak spot in backup DNA repair system | Scripps Research

Scientists at the Scripps Institute have discovered a defective DNA repair mechanism that would normally trigger cell death but which, paradoxically, keeps cancer cells alive. They have recently published their findings, open access, in Cell Reports. It is exactly the sort of biochemical complexity that creationists routinely mistake for evidence of intelligent design, having been led to believe that well-designed systems must be highly complex. In reality, good intelligent design is minimally complex: complexity increases the risk of failure, is harder to maintain, and is more energetically costly.

The DNA “code” is one of creationism’s favourite props for its familiar ignorance-plus-incredulity-therefore-God-did-it argument — a textbook god-of-the-gaps false dichotomy. Yet even a superficial look beneath the metaphor reveals that DNA replication and repair are very far from the flawless perfection we would expect from an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity — especially when it comes to its supposedly special creation, humankind. What we actually observe is a fragile, error-prone system patched together by evolutionary history rather than foresight.

The system is only needed in the first place because cell replication in multicellular organisms remains essentially identical to that of single-celled organisms. Despite the fact that the benefits of multicellularity arise from cell specialisation into tissues and organs with discrete functions — each requiring only a tiny fraction of the genome — every cell is forced to copy the entire DNA complement every time it divides. This vast waste of energy and resources serves only to multiply the probability of error, and errors are not rare anomalies but routine occurrences. This is not the signature of intelligent design.

The Scripps Institute team have shown that some cancer cells survive precisely because the normal high-fidelity repair system fails. When that happens, a crude backup mechanism takes over — an emergency repair process that is little more than a biological kludge and which introduces further errors as it works. It is rather like calling out an emergency plumber who fixes one leak by installing a long section of pipe riddled with smaller leaks. Would anyone describe that as intelligent workmanship?

Unintelligent design - If We Had Been Intelligently Designed, Modern Life Wouldn't Cause These Problems

A busy intersection in Zürich - where stress levels are high

Into the Woods | | UZH

If we take creationist claims about the human body at face value – that we are the special design of an omniscient, omnipotent creator god – we would have to conclude that this putative god equipped us for life in small, dispersed bands of hunter-gatherers, entirely free from the pressures of modern urban existence. That is the inescapable implication of new work by Daniel P. Longman of the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, UK, and Colin N. Shaw of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zürich, Switzerland.

In their study, recently published in Biological Reviews, they argue that human evolutionary fitness has deteriorated markedly over the past 300 years, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. They attribute this to the escalating stresses of urban life, which are increasingly linked to counter-survival problems such as declining fertility rates and the rising prevalence of chronic inflammatory conditions, including autoimmune diseases. They also highlight impaired cognitive function in urban settings, with chronic stress playing a central role in many of these conditions.

As they note, our stress responses were shaped in environments where predators such as lions posed intermittent but existential threats. A sudden burst of adrenaline and cortisol – the classic fight-or-flight reaction – made the difference between survival and being eaten. Today, however, we summon exactly the same physiological response to traffic noise, difficult conversations with colleagues or family, and that irritatingly arrogant but ignorant creationist on the Internet. Where a lion encounter would once have been an occasional shock, we now experience the physiological equivalent of facing several lions a day.

For creationists, this poses an awkward problem. An omniscient designer should have foreseen humanity’s future circumstances and endowed us with a physiology robust enough to cope with them. Evolution, by contrast, cannot predict even the next generation, let alone the demands of life tens or hundreds of millennia later. It optimised our ancestors for survival on open African landscapes, not for navigating congested cities, chronic noise, 24-hour information streams, and the relentless stimuli of modern technology. This helps explain why our inherited design is increasingly mismatched to our environment, and why evolution cannot adjust us quickly enough to keep pace.

My own family history illustrates this accelerating mismatch. My grandparents grew up in rural Oxfordshire, before the arrival of the motor car, electricity, modern sanitation, or powered heating. Their lives were essentially unchanged from those of their parents and grandparents. My parents, by contrast, had electricity, piped water, proper sanitation, and radio; later a motor car, a television, and eventually a telephone. Now we have smartphones, laptops, air travel, satnavs, and city centres jammed with traffic. We spend hours each day staring at screens, communicating instantly across the world. My grandparents’ lives would have been recognisable to their great-grandparents, but mine would be unrecognisable to them – such has been the accelerating pace of technological change. No evolutionary process could possibly adapt a species to that speed of environmental transformation.

We are, in effect, experiencing stress levels akin to those of ancestors living among a pride of lions, not merely encountering one on rare occasions. And crucially, we have little or no time to recover before the next ‘lion’ appears.

Refuting Creationism - The Human Skull Evolved Fastest of All the Apes

Great Apes

Gibbons

Phylogeny and configuration of landmarks and semilandmarks.

Gómez-Robles Aida, et al. (2025)

Humans evolved fastest amongst the apes | UCL News - UCL – University College London

A newly published paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from University College London (UCL) shows that the human skull evolved relatively rapidly compared to that of other apes. The evolutionary changes involve modifications in the size and shape of the facial and cranial bones.

This serves as a reminder of just how artificial and functionally useless the creationist concept of a “kind” is. It should also show creationists the fallacy of the frequent claim that biologists are abandoning the Theory of Evolution, since this paper discusses the results of evolution, not some infantile notion of magical intervention by an unevidenced supernatural entity.

Creationists are quite content to regard all cats—from domestic tabbies to tigers—as belonging to the same “kind”, even though the main difference between them lies in the size of their skeletons. Yet they balk at the idea that humans and the great apes could belong to the same “kind”, despite the fact that the key distinctions between us and them are also differences in size and proportion—most notably in the bones of the skull.

But then, “kind” is precisely the sort of term creationists favour because it has no fixed definition and can be expanded or contracted to suit whatever argument they are trying to make. The only consistent rule seems to be that whatever constitutes a “kind”, it must always exclude humans. This sometimes leads to the absurdity of defining an “animal kind” and a separate “human kind”.

The UCL team suggest that the rapid evolution of the human skull can be explained by the considerable advantage conferred by a larger brain and advanced cognitive abilities.

Our complex cognition allows us to communicate abstract ideas through both words and gestures—what we call “body language”—much of which depends on facial expression. A flat, forward-facing face enhances our ability to convey and interpret these subtle cues. As social animals, we identify acquaintances and strangers by their faces; we watch the faces of those who speak to us; and we instinctively read emotions such as pleasure, anger, confusion, or distress in their expressions.

In short, it is our large brain and expressive face that make us human — not the addition of new organs or limbs, as creationists often insist marks a change above the genus level, but rather differences in the size and shape of the bones of the skull. Given the close similarity of our genomes to those of other apes, these differences arise not from the amount of genetic information, but from the way that information is regulated during embryonic development.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Refuting Creationism - How The Placenta is the Product of Sub-Optimal Evolutionary Compromise.

Cooperation and Competition: How Fetal and Maternal Cells Evolved to Work Together - UConn Today

Creationists often imagine the human body as the handiwork of a supreme intelligence, carefully engineered for optimal function. Yet the reality revealed by biology is far messier. Our anatomy and physiology are riddled with compromises, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities that make far more sense as the outcomes of evolutionary processes than as the products of intelligent design. I give multiple examples of the results of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design. One striking example lies in the complex relationship between mother and foetus during pregnancy, where cooperation and conflict are locked in an evolutionary arms race.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Associate Professor Kshitiz of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, together with postdoctoral fellows Yasir Suhail and Wenqiang Du, Gunter Wagner of Yale, and Junaid Afzal of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), have shown how the interface between mother and foetus in the placenta is the product of evolutionary arms races—not the result of intelligent design, as creationists like to imagine.

Firstly, there is the need for the developing foetus to obtain an adequate supply of nutrients, which requires its placental cells to penetrate into the lining of the mother’s uterus.

Secondly, there is the need for the mother to defend herself against invasion by what her body recognises as a ‘foreign’ organism, part of her evolved immune response. Finally, there is the overarching evolutionary imperative of successful reproduction, which entails the birth of healthy offspring.

What the team discovered is that the inevitable evolutionary compromise involves the foetus’s placental cells producing a protein that suppresses the mother’s immune response. This suppression works only because the mother’s cells have evolved to cooperate, allowing the foetal protein to function.

In other words, the mother’s cells have evolved a strategy for permitting the foetus to dampen her immune system—an immune system that itself evolved in the ancestors of placental mammals. This situation can hardly be credited to the act of a supreme intelligence.

Refuting Creationism - Who's In Charge, You Or Your Gut Microbes?

Newly Discovered ‘Sixth Sense’ Links Gut Microbes to the Brain in Real Time | Duke University School of Medicine

Creationists like to believe they were created perfectly by a benevolent god. Evolutionary biologists, however, know better — and the latest research shows just how wrong the creationist fantasy really is. It turns out that your appetite isn’t entirely under your control. Instead, it’s influenced — perhaps even partly dictated — by the trillions of bacteria and other microbes living in your gut, which evolved to keep themselves well-fed. If you’re a creationist, that means your “perfect design” includes being manipulated by microorganisms.

To anyone who understands evolution, this will come as no particular surprise; to a creationist who believes they were created perfectly, it will be disturbing news, provoking the most convoluted of mental contortions to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance.

The gut microbiome — consisting of multiple species of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and other single-celled organisms — has evolved to influence, if not completely control, our appetite. They do this to ensure they get an adequate supply of nutrients.

Refuting Creationism - Biofluorescent fish 112 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A tropical striped triplefin, Helcogramma striata.

© John Sparks and David Gruber

Creationists bunker - Evidence keep out! No Science Allowed!

Studies Reveal Fish Biofluorescence Dates Back 112 Million Years | AMNH

I sometimes imagine creationists hiding inside a bunker with no windows, completely cut off from the reality outside, where a torrential rainstorm is underway. From within their sealed refuge, they declare to themselves—and to the world outside—that there is no evidence of rain, simply because they can’t see any.

Their only source of information is a handful of picture books depicting a tropical paradise where it never rains, so they believe everything beyond their bunker must be warm and sunny—just as the picture books describe. Anyone who tells them otherwise, or tries to show them a different picture, must be lying to trick them.

How else can creationists be so insulated from the reality of the deluge of scientific evidence in the real world?

That slightly tortured analogy is by way of introducing another couple of scientific papers concerning the evolutionary divergence of the phenomenon of biofluorescence. Unlike bioluminescence—where light is produced by a physiological process using ATP and functions in total darkness—biofluorescence involves the absorption of ambient light, which is then re-emitted at a different frequency. Specialised proteins absorb this light energy, become unstable in their excited state, and return to their ground state by releasing photons—hence biofluorescence functions in low-light conditions.

Fish in particular, but also sea turtles and corals, use these glowing patterns as signals—for attracting mates, confusing predators, and more. According to two newly published papers by a team led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), this phenomenon first emerged around 112 million years ago—once again, firmly within Earth’s long pre–'Creation Week' history. Since then, biofluorescence appears to have evolved independently up to 100 times, a clear indication of its adaptive benefits in dimly lit ocean environments.

Beyond the evidence for biological activity in a time creationists claim the Earth didn’t even exist, there's another uncomfortable detail for them: the researchers declare that to understand the pattern of bioluminescence in nature, “...we need to understand the underlying evolutionary story...” Not something a creationist, labouring under the delusion that biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution in favour of creationism, would want to read.

Their findings are published open access in Nature Communications and PLOS ONE.

Refuting Creationism - Homing In On Consciousness - No Gods Involved

Landmark experiment sheds new light on the origins of consciousness - Allen Institute

Consciousness, like the Big Bang and abiogenesis, represents a gap in scientific understanding that creationists eagerly exploit as a place to insert their evidence-free deity — the classic “God of the gaps” fallacy. This false dichotomy is the lifeblood of creationism, which appeals to the scientifically illiterate and culturally chauvinistic creationists who view science as a rival to their preferred local religion. According to this view, if science cannot yet explain something, or if it has ever been wrong, then “God did it” wins by default.

However, a major new study suggests that science is closing in on a natural explanation for consciousness. The findings support the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of neurophysiology, leaving no room — or need — for supernatural explanations. In a landmark 2019 collaborative experiment involving human subjects, researchers from the Allen Institute tested two competing theories of consciousness against one another. They published their findings today in Nature, claiming the study marks a pivotal moment in the quest to understand this elusive phenomenon. Further details are available in an Allen Institute news article.

The Unintelligent Designer - Another Error-Prone Bungle to Compensate for a Bungled Design

William Heath Robinson

Peacekeeper cells protect the body from autoimmunity during infection | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

A significant issue with our immune system is that it is poorly "designed." If it were truly the product of an intelligent designer, as creationists claim, that designer would hardly be competent enough to design a simple household item, let alone a complex biological system.

Because our immune system is so disorganized and inefficient, multiple layers of complexity have evolved to mitigate its worst shortcomings. However, these added layers themselves remain prone to errors, as they reflect the same flawed foundation. The central problem arises because the immune system must balance two contradictory requirements: it needs to be sensitive enough to identify and eliminate genuine threats, yet not so sensitive that it mistakenly attacks the body's own tissues.

While an omnipotent, supremely intelligent designer should have easily resolved such a contradiction, the reality is that our immune system frequently fails on both counts. It often permits pathogens and parasites to invade, and it also frequently turns against the body itself, leading to autoimmune diseases such as lupus, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and kidney or liver failure, among numerous other debilitating conditions that cause immense suffering.

Like the whimsical contraptions created by cartoonist William Heath Robinson — complex machines built from objects originally intended for entirely different purposes - the mammalian immune system is not designed top-down from a clear blueprint. Rather, it's built up gradually from one makeshift adaptation piled onto another, each new solution attempting to compensate for the shortcomings of earlier ones. Eventually, this process results in a ramshackle system so intricate that its complexity itself creates new opportunities for failure. Such complexity is not indicative of intelligent, purposeful design, which would typically favour simplicity and efficiency. Instead, it reflects an ad hoc, utilitarian approach driven by evolutionary constraints and an inability to anticipate future challenges.

And of course, this embarrassment for creationism is made worse by the fact that, according to Michael J. Behe, pathogenic parasites such as E. coli and Plasmodium falciparum are examples of irreducible complexity, so are, in creationist circles, unarguable 'proof' of intelligent design, so the immune system is allegedly designed by the designer of these pathogens to protect us from them.

It seems creationists have no difficulty in believing the same designer would design parasites to make sick, then design a system to protect us from its pathogenic designs, and even though that system doesn't work very well, it is nevertheless evidence of supreme intelligence.

New Book - Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution

This book looks at the ID/Creationism vs evolution debate from multiple angles and analyses why the science of evolutionary biology refutes the childish notion of intelligent design.

I wrote it because, creationism is dangerous. It replaces evidence-based knowledge with superstition and creates the impression that cultural prejudice and ignorant incredulity are better measures of reality than observation, analysis and reason.

Now more than ever we need our politicians, law-makers and captains of industry to be able to make sense of complex data and use it to make wise decisions, not dismiss it as based on ‘flawed’ concepts and the result of conspiracies designed to turn people away from the ‘truth’ as revealed in ancient texts declared to be holy. As is clearly shown in the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document and in the wilful misrepresentations of science its fellows dutifully feed to the largely scientifically-illiterate public, there is a hidden political agenda that depends on people believing falsehoods and thinking anti-science is some sort of moral crusade to restore Western civilisation to a notional ideal golden age in pre-renaissance Europe when the slave trade was booming and witch-burning was a regular spectacle in the local town square.

This was a time when people like Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted and deprived of their livelihood and even their life, for revealing the empirical evidence that Earth orbits the sun – not because they had falsified the data but because the data falsified the Bible. The sacred superstitions, even though empirically proved wrong, had to be defended against the truth as revealed by the physical data.

Refuting Creationism - Teenage Puberty, 15,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Human life in the European Pleistocene

AI generated (ChatGPT4.0)

Reconstruction of Romito 2, a 16-year-old teenager with a form of dwarfism who lived 11,000 years ago in southern Italy.

Drawing by: Olivier Graveleau.

Realities of Ice Age puberty - University of Victoria

The thing about this study from a creationist perspective is its two-fold refutation of basic creationist dogma.

Firstly, it is not so much that teenagers in the last Ice Age went through puberty at pretty much the same age as modern teenagers, despite an assumed improvement in the diet of modern people compared to that of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, but that there were actually human teenagers 15,000 years before creationist dogma says that there was an Earth.

Secondly, there is the fact that the remains of these teenagers are available for analysis, when the mythical global genocidal flood, so beloved of creationists, should have swept it all away.

But counter-factual creationism is never perturbed by scientific evidence because, as all creationists know, scientific evidence is either lies made up by evil scientists, or just plain wrong as 'proven' by the fact that creationist cult leaders say so and it doesn't conform with what a bunch of scientifically-illiterate Bronze Age pastoralists who thought the universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it, made up in their origin myths.

Malevolent Designer - How Zebra Fish Can 'Heal' Blindness - And Humans Can't

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[right caption]

Zebrafish photoreceptor cells stimulated with blue light show correct electrical activity. The picture was taken using the microscope that was custom-built for this study.

Seeing the Future: Zebrafish Regenerates Fully Functional Photoreceptor Cells and Restores Its Vision — Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) — TU Dresden

Readers may remember my recent post about how researchers have discovered that zebra fish can heal a transected spinal cord, and why creationists need to explain why their putative omnibenevolent designer apparently chose not to give this ability to all vertebrates, including its supposedly favourite special vertebrate, humans
.
Was it because it prefers to watch paraplegics suffer or because it forgot how to?

Well, now we have more evidence, if you accept the childish creationist 'intelligent [sic] design, nonsense, of how the same fish, have apparently been given another ability that would have hugely benefitted humans and other animals - they can repair damage to their visual receptors in their eyes, in other words, they can heal blindness.

A believer in intelligent [sic] design, must accept that, since their designer god apparently knew how to give this ability to zebra fish, it knew how to give it to all vertebrates and made the conscious decision not to.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Gave A Fish The Ability To Mend a Damaged Spine, But Not Humans

Top: fluorescently labeled cells in the spinal cord of a zebrafish recovering one week after injury.
Bottom: recovery four weeks after injury.

Zebra fish in the lab of Robin Tanguay at Oregan Stae University.

Photo: Lynn Ketchum

Zebrafish use surprising strategy to regrow spinal cord – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Just as amputees can't regrow a lost limb, so spine-injured patients can't repair a damaged spine, and yet, several species of amphibian can grow new limbs and Zebra fish can grow a new spinal cord.

Which leaves intelligent [sic] design creationists to explain why, if their putative designer can give some species the ability to regrow a lost limb or repair a transected spinal cord, he chose not to give that ability to his supposedly favourite, 'special' creation, humans.

But of course, those are not the only abilities and systems that could have been better in humans if the same designer designed other animals with superior abilities and systems:

Birds of prey have a vastly superior visual acuity to humans; birds in general have a much more efficient respiratory system which enables then to fly at heights at which we would be unconscious for lack of oxygen. Many animals have a vastly superior sense of hearing to what we have, and bats have a better immune system. Elephants and sharks both rarely get cancer, and so the list goes on.

Unintelligent Designer News - Is Creationism's Incompetent Designer Also A Racist?

National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organization (NACCHO) logo

Torres Strait family on Thursday Island.

Image source: Let’s Learn about the Torres Strait Islands, Oz Publishing.

Lupus is more common and severe in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Learning why is crucial

The realisation that Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders are not only more prone to the autoimmune condition lupus but suffer a more severe form of it than Europeans, would be an embarrassment for creationists if they were aware of it and understood the implications for some of their most cherished superstitions.

It has long been known that Africans and Asians are more prone to lupus, but this study shows that Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders may have been singled out for special attention, if you believe these things are designed by creationism's putative designer.

In general terms. lupus is a failure if the immune system in that something triggers it to turn against the person instead of protecting them. As an example of design, it is an example of incompetence in the extreme. It's like creating an army to protect a country, only to have it turn on the people of that country and start massacring them, because it's mistaken them for invaders. This might be a feature of mal-formed banana republics, but it's hardly a sign of a well-designed civilised society.

But, of course, creationists have been primed to blame these design failures, like parasites, on the scientifically nonsensical 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution', but if that were to blame for the greater suffering of these Austronesians that would mean that they have 'devolved' further than other humans and so must have been subject to more 'genetic entropy'. But all humans have been around for the same length of time, whether you accept the science or believe the childish magic creation just a few thousand years ago, so what would cause this accelerated rate of 'genetic entropy' in a regional population?

Refuting Creationisn - Understanding Consciousness - No God(s) Required

Study reveals how an anesthesia drug induces unconsciousness | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One of creationism beloved gaps in which they try to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god, is a scientific explanation for consciousness.

It is true that we don't yet have an explanation for consciousness but no gap in the scientific understanding of anything has ever been filled by a god, or to be more scientific, by an unproven, undetectable supernatural entity, so it's a strangely unrealistic view of science that any (or all) of creationism's gaps, real or imaginary are going to be the exception to the rule and somehow, one day, science is going to reveal the locally popular god in all its glory, having managed to hide itself for millennia.

Being inherently unfalsifiable, of course, there is no possible scientific methodology that could reveal any specified god as the indisputable cause of any phenomenon, so creationist belief that this is about to happen is delusional.

But back to the problem of consciousness.

Unintelligent Design - Why Do Males Have Useless Nipples? - It's Evolution, Naturally!

New mathematical model sheds light on the absence of breastfeeding in male mammals - News and events, University of York

Ask an intelligent [sic] design creationists why males have nipples, and you'll get lots of evasion and avoidance but no answer beyond mutterings about an 'ineffable god', and 'not knowing the minds of the creator', betraying the religious underpinning of creationism.

So, why exactly do males have nipples?

The answer is, of course, evolution.