Unintelligent Design - An Arms Race Between a Parasitic Beetle And a Parasitic Fungus

Creationism's Unintelligent Designer Trying To Solve The Problem He Just Created

Adult spruce bark beetles in their galleries in the bark of a Norway spruce tree. The beetle in the middle is infected with the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

© Benjamin Weiss, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Fungus turns bark beetles’ defenses against them

A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) has raised the spectre of evolutionary arms races for creationism. Evolutionary arms races are something of a nightmare for creationists because, within the paradigm of intelligent design by a single designer, having an arms race with yourself makes no sense at all.

Evolutionary arms races are among the strongest arguments against intelligent design, as I point out in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax. They epitomise stupidity. What on Earth is the point of designing a solution to a problem for one species, only to treat that solution as a problem to be solved for another? It is almost exactly as if two organisms are evolving in response to changes in their environments, of which their predator or prey is a key component. It makes less sense than a dog chasing its own tail – at least the dog gets some exercise.

The arms race reported in this paper, by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, is between the spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, and the pathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana.

In fact, there are two arms races at work here. The first is between the Norway spruce, Picea abies, and its microbial environment. The tree produces antimicrobial phenolic compounds as a defence. The spruce bark beetle has evolved the ability to convert these compounds into an even more toxic derivative, which helps protect the beetle and enables it to successfully colonise the spruce.

The clever twist is that the fungus Beauveria bassiana has evolved a countermeasure. It converts the beetle’s toxic compound by binding a sugar molecule to it and adding a methyl group. This modification effectively neutralises the beetle’s antifungal defence, making it more susceptible to fungal infection.

Translated into creationist terms, a designer first designed a defence for the spruce that can be exploited by a parasitic beetle to protect itself from microbes, including a pathogenic fungus. The same designer then designed a pathogenic fungus capable of neutralising the beetle’s defences, allowing it to infect the beetle more efficiently.

Malevolent Design - How Cancer Perfectly Illustrates ID Creationism's 'Proof' of Intelligent Design

Creationism's God at work

Creationism's intelligent designer creating cancer.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2).

Dresden research group uncovers new key mechanism in cancer cells | TU Dresden

ID advocates should be thrilled to learn that a team of researchers from Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany, together with colleagues from Charles University, Prague, Czechia, have discovered a perfect example of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe claim is proof of intelligent design—namely complex specified information and irreducible complexity. The team have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

There is one slight problem, however: this supposed ‘proof of intelligent design’ turns out to be one of the mechanisms that makes cancer so effective at increasing pain and suffering — and at killing people.

This presents creationists with a theological conundrum. Either there is more than one intelligent designer, which comes close to—or even crosses—the line into blasphemy, or the intelligent designer is actively and knowingly creating a cause of pain and suffering, and is therefore not the omnibenevolent deity portrayed in the Bible.

The stark alternative to these theologically insurmountable problems is equally problematic for ID creationism: admitting that their ‘proof of intelligent design’ is nothing of the sort, and is better explained as the result of a natural process in which no intelligence was involved—thereby absolving their god of any culpability.

The TUD-led team discovered that the protein MCL1 not only inhibits programmed cell death, or apoptosis, but also plays a central role in tumour metabolism. Normal, non-cancerous cells will usually self-destruct if their DNA becomes corrupted beyond repair, but when this process fails, a tumour can develop through the proliferation of cells carrying damaged DNA. In cancers, this self-destruct mechanism is suppressed by MCL1.

The team also found that MCL1 is not only responsible for preventing apoptosis, but also dysregulates cellular energy metabolism. In other words, a single factor ensures both cancer cell survival and the functioning of key metabolic and signalling pathways for the benefit of the tumour.

In Michael J. Behe’s terms, all the components of this survival mechanism must be present for the cancer to persist; and in William A. Dembski’s terms, the genetic information coding for MCL1 must constitute highly specified complex information.

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 - The Irreducibly Complex Cause Of Alzheimers - Malevolent Design or Evolution?

Clues to Alzheimer’s disease may be hiding in our ‘junk’ DNA

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, have identified DNA switches that help control how astrocytes work. These are brain cells that support neurons and are known to play a role in Alzheimer’s disease. They have just published their findings in Nature Neuroscience.

Coming soon after researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark discovered a design defect in astrocytes that contributes to the development of Alzheimer’s, this represents a double embarrassment for those creationists who understand its implications.

Firstly, there is the embarrassment that the cause of Alzheimer’s is indistinguishable from Michael J. Behe’s favourite ‘proof’ of intelligent design — irreducible complexity — in that all the elements must be present for Alzheimer’s to occur.

Secondly, there is the discovery by the Australian team of which triggers ‘switch on’ which genes that affect the astrocytes implicated in Alzheimer’s. These switches are embedded in the 98% of the human genome that is non-coding, or so-called ‘junk’ DNA. Since they can be separated from the genes they regulate by thousands of base pairs, it has been notoriously difficult to identify which switches control which genes. Now, using CRISPR, the team have identified around 150 of these regulatory elements.

The existence of this non-coding DNA has long been an embarrassment for creationists, who have been unable to explain why an intelligent designer would produce so much DNA that does not contain the roughly 20,000 genes that actually code for proteins. Why such prolific waste, adding massively to the risk of errors that can result in cancer?

The creationist response has been to conflate the terms ‘non-coding’ and ‘non-functional’, and then proclaim this ‘functional DNA’ as intelligently designed — reducing, but by no means eliminating, the amount of ‘junk’ they still have to explain away. Of course, ‘non-coding’ does not mean ‘not transcribed’, only that the RNA does not code for a functional protein. However, this non-coding but functional DNA does play a role in gene expression, in that the resulting RNA can act as controls or ‘switches’ that turn genes on and off.

So, creationists — having triumphantly waved ‘functional, non-coding DNA’ as evidence for intelligent design after all — are now presented with the fact that it is part of the ‘irreducible’ cause of Alzheimer’s, and probably the cause of many other diseases with a genetic basis.

Malevolent Design - The Diseases That Wouldn't Exist if an Intelligent Designer Was Real

Genomic Maps Untangle the Complex Roots of Disease

In another major embarrassment for those creationists who understand it, researchers at the Gladstone Institutes and Stanford University have developed a method for linking the genome of a cell to diseases caused by specific gene variants. They have recently published their findings, open access, in Nature.

Creationists insist that the human genome was intelligently designed, with every outcome the result of “complex specified information” which, according to Discovery Institute Fellow William A. Dembski, constitutes definitive evidence of intelligent design. If this were true, it would follow that genes which cause disease were intelligently designed to cause those diseases.

The difficulty deepens for creationists when one considers that many diseases involve multiple genes, sometimes hundreds or even thousands, all of which must possess the “correct” variants for the disease to emerge. In other words, some diseases not only depend on Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information”, but also conform to Michael J. Behe’s proposed hallmark of intelligent design: irreducible complexity.

Unless creationists invoke an additional creator—one over whom their reputedly omnipotent and omniscient god has no control—their supposedly intelligent designer must have deliberately created these gene variants to produce the suffering they cause.

By contrast, the evolutionary explanation requires no such mental gymnastics. The existence of genetic variants is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts, and provided such variants remain rare within a population, there is little selective pressure to remove them. A genome produced by an omniscient, perfect designer, however, would contain no such variants: the original design would be flawless, as would the mechanisms responsible for replicating it. The very existence of gene variants is therefore evidence against intelligent design.

The technique developed by the research team is sensitive enough to examine the entire genome and determine which genes influence which cell types. This makes it possible to identify which genes contribute to particular diseases. In cases where a single gene is involved, this can be relatively straightforward, but where many genes are implicated, it can be extremely difficult to disentangle their individual effects—precisely the problem this new technique helps to overcome.

Unintelligent Design - The Human Brain Responds To the Calls of Chimpanzees - Why?

Our brains recognise the voices of our primate cousins - Medias - UNIGE


Turn your volume control on and click to play

You might not realise it, but, if you just played that audio file, according to researchers at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, a region of your brain - the auditory cortex - just 'lit up'.

This region is responsible for voice recognition, and it responds not only to human voices but also to the calls of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Notably, the same response is not seen with the calls of bonobos (Pan paniscus) or rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Their findings have been published open access in eLife.

This discovery presents creationists with yet another problem to be ignored, misrepresented or lied about.

Using William A. Dembski’s so-called “proof of intelligent design” — complex specified genetic information, widely cited by creationists as evidence for design and against evolution — we are entitled to ask an obvious question. Why would an intelligent designer create genetic information for a supposedly “too complex to have evolved by random chance” region of the human brain that responds selectively to chimpanzee calls?

What, precisely, was this ability designed for?

By contrast, the evolutionary explanation is straightforward. If humans and chimpanzees share a relatively recent common ancestor, we would expect some neural processing traits to be retained, particularly where there has been no strong selection pressure to eliminate them.

The finding does, however, raise an interesting secondary question: why do we not respond in the same way to bonobo calls?

The answer is likely to come from evolutionary biology. Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged fairly recently, and there may have been a selective advantage for bonobo calls not to be recognised by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are known to kill and eat bonobos if given the opportunity, so selection may have favoured divergence in vocal signals — with the consequence that humans also lost sensitivity to bonobo calls.

Once again, we encounter a feature of nature that is difficult to reconcile with the notion of an intelligent designer, yet entirely consistent with evolutionary processes acting on shared ancestry, divergence, and selection pressures.

Scientifically, the work is also of considerable interest, as it may shed light on how human speech recognition and language development arise in children. For the creationist, however, it is merely one more inconvenient piece of evidence — to be filed under “not wanted — reject” or “evidence of a Satanic conspiracy — ignore”.

Unintelligent Design - Something Any Intelligent Designer Could Have Done, If It Was Real

The figure depicts the NFR5 kinase structure and juxtamembrane motif

Discovery of a Key Protein Motif Essential for Root Nodule Symbiosis

Scientists at Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered that barley can be induced to form a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria through a simple substitution of two amino acids in a single protein. This tweak enables barley to initiate the same sort of symbiosis that legumes use to “self-fertilise”. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

This is yet another case where we can legitimately ask: if scientists can do it, why didn’t creationism’s supposed intelligent designer do it, if its intent were truly to create a world optimised for human existence? The question remains unanswered, often provoking threats and hysteria on social media, as creationists scramble to cover their confusion with guesses rooted in Christian fundamentalism and Biblical tales of “The Fall”. It’s a core theological patch, while the forlorn Discovery Institute and its fellows remain as silent on this issue as they are on parasites and pathogens—still struggling to sustain the pretence that ID creationism is real science rather than Bible-literalist creationism dressed in a grubby lab coat.

The Aarhus researchers found that a highly conserved protein, present across plant species, plays a crucial role in plant–microbe interactions—presumably as part of the plant’s defence against pathogens. However, in legumes the same protein must be suppressed, because its normal activity prevents formation of the root nodules that act as low-oxygen refuges for the nitrogen-fixing bacteria on which legumes depend. A simple mutation in this protein allows nodule formation in barley, enabling the crop to produce its own nitrogen fertiliser, increasing yields without the expense of artificial fertilisers and without the ecological harm they cause when they leach into waterways.

Unintelliget Designer News - How Frogs Have Evolved To Resist Hornet Stings.

Fearless frogs feast on deadly hornets | Kobe University News site

The venomous stinger of an Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia). The venom injected by this stinger can cause sharp, intense pain as well as local tissue damage and systemic effects such as destruction of red blood cells and cardiac dysfunction, which may even be fatal.

© Shinji Sugiura, Ecosphere 2025 (DOI 10.1002/ecs2.70457) (CC BY)

Does anything eat wasps?

Yes. As I’ve observed myself, the common pond frog eats wasps apparently with impunity. I once watched a frog in our garden pond consume three wasps within a few minutes as they came down to drink. These frogs have, of course, evolved in the presence of wasps.

Now, according to research by Shinji Sugiura at Kobe University, Japan, published today, open access, in the journal Ecosphere, frogs that have evolved alongside an even more dangerous member of the wasp family – the Asian giant hornet – have also evolved resistance to venom that is toxic, even lethal, to many other creatures.

Creationists, however, insist that evolution does not happen and that wasps, frogs, and hornets were all intelligently designed by a supernatural deity synonymous with the god of the Bible and Qur’an. This leaves us wondering why an allegedly omnipotent, omniscient, supremely intelligent designer would equip wasps and hornets with a sting to defend themselves against predators, only then to design predators with resistance to that sting.

Creationists normally ignore this question, of course. Even their stock excuse – 'The Fall' – cannot be applied here. Neither frog nor hornet is parasitic on the other, except in the trivial sense that any predator is a “parasite” on its prey. But in this case, the frog appears to be the beneficiary: it gains a meal at no cost, while the wasp or hornet loses its life. And it is difficult to imagine that the genes conferring this immunity do *not

fall within William A. Dembski’s definition of “complex, specified information”. If they do not, then nothing producing a beneficial outcome can be so classified, and his argument for the existence of an intelligent designer collapses.

As the outcome of an evolutionary arms race, both the sting and the resistance in frogs make perfect sense—no need to invoke some forgetful designer who cannot recall what it supposedly created yesterday and treats it as a problem to be solved today.

In the case of these frogs, there may even be two distinct forms of immunity: resistance to pain and resistance to toxicity. It is already known that some hymenopterans deliver an excruciating sting with low toxicity, while others deliver a highly toxic sting with little or no pain.

Unintelligent Design - How The Human Genome Has Mutation-Prone Weak Spots - Incompetence, Malevolence or Evolution?

Mosaic blastocyst

AI-generated image ChatGPT 5.1

If the outcome is pre-ordained, what are all the other sperms for?

New mutation hotspot discovered in human genome | EurekAlert!

Creationists and other religious fundamentalists claim that their god deliberately fashions each human life according to a divine plan — that every individual is personally designed, even down to the genes they inherit from their parents. But this raises a perpetually unanswered question: why produce so many sperm cells, all competing to reach the egg, if the outcome is pre-ordained?

Creationists also insist that our DNA is a “code”, equivalent to a computer program that must have been created by an intelligent designer or programmer.

If that were true, we would expect the genes bestowed on each individual to be robustly designed and immutable.

However, new research by scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, just published in Nature Communications, shows that this is not the case — and once again, a prediction of fundamentalist creationism has been falsified by science.

The researchers found that the human genome is especially vulnerable to mutations in the first 100 base pairs of genes, particularly during the earliest rounds of cell division in embryo development. Each division introduces mutations with the potential to cause disease, including cancer. Because these mutations do not appear in every cell of the early embryo, the resulting individual becomes a genetic mosaic, with some cells and tissues carrying certain mutations while others do not. But if the mutated cells give rise to germ cells — eggs or sperm — the mutation can be passed to the next generation, whose members will carry it in all their cells and may develop disease as a result.

Unless creationism’s designer god intended this outcome, or is incompetent, there is no coherent way to present this as the deliberate work of an intelligent designer. It is, however, entirely consistent with an unintelligent, utilitarian evolutionary process that settles for sub-optimal solutions based on a single criterion: what produces the most descendants who themselves reproduce?

Unintelligent Design - How a Design Blunder Causes Severe Mental Health Problems

Universität Leipzig: Changes in a single gene can cause mental illness

A recent study from the University of Leipzig, just published, open access, in Molecular Psychiatry highlights the difference between an intelligently designed system and one which evolved naturally. Change a single gene involved in neurotransmission and the human feature that creationists wave as evidence for intelligent design - the human brain - seriously malfunctions.

The gene, GRIN2A, encodes a key subunit of the NMDA receptor — a molecular gateway through the cell membrane of neurones essential for learning, memory, language development, and the ability of the brain to fine-tune its own wiring. When functioning normally, children learn to speak, form memories, and develop the balanced neural circuits that underpin thought and behaviour. When it doesn’t, the result can be epileptic seizures, speech loss, cognitive impairment, and an increased vulnerability to psychiatric illness. In some cases, even sleep becomes a time of neurological storm activity, with continuous spike-wave patterns eroding normal brain development.

For anyone who understands evolution, this fragility makes perfect sense. For those insisting that the human brain is the product of foresight and planning, it presents a serious problem. It is a system built by evolutionary tinkering, not design. The NMDA receptor is one of the pillars of excitatory communication in the brain. Yet it is also a precarious, expensive and failure-prone piece of biological machinery. A single amino acid substitution in the GRIN2A protein can derail synaptic signalling, scramble brain rhythms, or impair the processes that enable children to acquire language.

This is not what robust design looks like.

Incompetent Design - How Sunlight Turns Off Cancer Protection in Skin

Schematic of the role of YTHDF2 in regulating U6 snRNA decay and interaction with TLR3 to control UVB-induced inflammation and tumorigenesis.

Seungwon Yang, Yan-Hong Cui, Haixia Li, et al.(2025), Fig.7 P

New study reveals how controlling sunburn-triggered inflammation may prevent skin cancer - UChicago Medicine

Researchers at the University of Chicago have uncovered how prolonged exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation can lead to skin cancer by disabling a vital protective mechanism in skin cells. They have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

This protective mechanism relies on a protein called YTHDF2, which plays a key role in regulating RNA metabolism and maintaining cellular health. Sunlight degrades this protein, removing that safeguard and allowing damage to accumulate.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID) creationism, this research presents several awkward questions—questions they will either ignore or attribute to ‘sin’.

First, why is this protection needed at all? If life were intentionally and intelligently designed, why would RNA metabolism require an additional, failure-prone layer of regulation to keep cells functioning? Why not design it to be robust in the first place?

Second, why create a system so fragile that sunlight—an unavoidable feature of life on Earth—can disable it? Designing a repair mechanism that breaks down precisely when it is needed most hardly inspires confidence in the designer’s competence.

And then there is the broader problem: ID creationism equates its designer with the supposedly omniscient and omnipotent god of the Bible or Qur’an. If that is true, why design a mechanism that predictably causes cancer? Was this an act of malevolence or oversight?

If YTHDF2 were flawless and impervious to degradation, Discovery Institute fellow William A. Dembski would no doubt present it as an example of “complex specified information,” a supposed indicator of intelligent purpose. But its vulnerability raises uncomfortable possibilities: Is this an unsuccessful attempt to patch over earlier design flaws in RNA metabolism? A sign of competing designers beyond the control of ID’s putative omnipotent creator? Or evidence that the designer is actively introducing harm and suffering?

The answer, of course, is that this problem arises because the human body is not the product of intelligent design at all, but of a long evolutionary process that modifies existing processes and structures to produce workable—though often imperfect—solutions. Evolution favours whatever improves short-term reproductive success, even if it introduces compromises and sub-optimal outcomes that undermine long-term survival and health. These sub-optimal systems then drive the evolution of an additional layers of complexity to minimise the results of failure.

Like other organism's the human body is full of these examples of evolutionary compromises and sub-optimal solutions that cause diseases and health problems that illustrate the difference between an intelligently designed system and an evolved system. Looked at in detail, the human body is evidence against intelligent design and strongly supports the Theory of Evolution, as I show in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.

Malevolent Designer News - Stunning 3D Images of the Yellow Fever Virus Reveal It's Irreducible Complexity - Malevolent Design or Evolution

High-resolution imaging of yellow fever virus reveals structural secrets that could power next-generation vaccines.

UQ scientists uncover secrets of yellow fever - News - The University of Queensland
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, have produced near atomic-level 3D images of the yellow fever virus. These reveal the remarkable complexity that Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insist constitutes evidence of intelligent design – a theme almost universally endorsed by creationists and forming the central plank of their advocacy for creationism.

They have recently published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

So, the obvious question for intelligent design advocates is this: is the irreducible complexity and complex specificity of the yellow fever virus evidence that it was intelligently designed to kill people? Or, when complex specified information and irreducible complexity do harm to humans, do these supposed ‘evidences’ for the existence of an intelligent designer (i.e. a god) somehow cease to apply, even though they benefit the virus? If so, how can a supposedly scientific definition change its meaning depending on the subjective judgement of what is being specified and how much or how little it benefits humans?

Unintelligent Design - The Design Blunder That Causes Many Diseases - Malevolence or Incompetence?

Glutathionylated mtDNA

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.1)

New type of DNA damage found in our cells’ powerhouses | UCR News | UC Riverside

Scientists led by the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a previously unknown form of DNA damage in mitochondria that may underlie a wide range of disorders linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Mitochondria contain their own DNA (mtDNA), which is essential for the proper functioning of these organelles that convert glucose into ATP, supplying cells with the energy needed to power metabolic processes.

The culprit is a large molecule, glutathionylate, which attaches to DNA and, if left unrepaired, can cause mutations. Researchers at UC Riverside, working with colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, found that glutathionylated mtDNA accumulates in mitochondria at levels up to 80 times higher than in the cell nucleus. In short, the nuclear DNA repair system is vastly more efficient than its mitochondrial counterpart.

For advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), this discovery—if they understood it rather than dismissing it as part of an imagined conspiracy to undermine their faith—creates an acute theological problem. If we temporarily grant the core assumption of ID creationism, that a supernatural designer indistinguishable from the allegedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god of the Bible and Qur’an is responsible for the design of mitochondrial DNA and its replication machinery, then only two coherent conclusions follow:

• the designer is incompetent, having failed to produce fault-free mtDNA and an adequate repair mechanism, despite supposedly managing this for nuclear DNA; or
• the designer could have produced fault-free mtDNA but chose instead to create error-prone mtDNA and a weak repair process, thereby intentionally designing disease and suffering—in other words, malevolence.

Moreover, the very need for a repair system betrays the absence of omnipotent, intelligent engineering. It is characteristic instead of the layered complexity produced by cumulative, unplanned evolutionary processes, which inevitably yield sub-optimal compromises.

The notion of an omniscient designer also rules out the excuse that the harmful consequences were unforeseeable. An all-knowing creator would have foreseen them; yet, according to ID logic, the designer implemented them regardless—designing mitochondrial DNA to fail and cause disease.

Thus, a biological phenomenon that fits seamlessly within the framework of evolutionary theory becomes an insurmountable theological obstacle for ID advocates, who must contort the evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion while catering to a scientifically illiterate and credulous audience.

Unintelligent Design - The Defect that Causes Alzheimer's - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Exosomes

Researchers discover cell defect linked to the development of Alzheimer’s

Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark have identified a defect in the production of exosomes within cells, linked to a mutation found in patients with dementia. Their findings are published in the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, *Alzheimer’s & Dementia*.

Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that all genetic information must originate from an intelligent agent, claiming that anything both complex and specified cannot arise without deliberate design. Their proposed designer is invariably indistinguishable from the god of the Bible and Qur’an: an all-knowing, all-powerful and supposedly benevolent creator.

What they never address is why a system attributed to such a being should fail at all—let alone in ways that cause profound suffering. It is akin to a human engineer producing an aircraft with engines that randomly fail or wings that detach mid-flight. And because this designer is held to be omniscient, the failure cannot be inadvertent. It must have been foreseen and deliberately incorporated, making such mutations part of the intended plan rather than unfortunate accidents.

Following the internal logic of ID creationism, Alzheimer’s dementia would therefore count as an intended outcome—meeting William Dembski’s own criteria for “complex specified genetic information”. This provides yet another instance, alongside the cancer example I discussed recently, of biological processes that appear designed to destroy. It sits comfortably among the many parasites and pathogens explored in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is Not Good, all pointing to a distinctly malign pattern in the supposed “design”.

ID proponents typically fall back on blaming “The Fall”, implying the existence of another creative force beyond the control of their designer. This manoeuvre only further undermines their claim that ID is a scientific enterprise rather than creationism thinly disguised, since it relies on biblical literalism to rescue the argument from the conclusion of an incompetent or malevolent designer—an outcome that is theologically awkward and, for many believers, outright heretical.

Malevolent Design - How Some Cancers Are Designed to Win - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Cancer cells dividing

Shapeshifting cancers’ masters, unmasked | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Scientists led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Christopher Vakoc have uncovered a mechanism by which certain cancers manage to evade modern medical treatments: they can disguise themselves as ordinary cells from entirely different tissues, such as those of the skin. In two recent papers — one in Nature Communications and another in Cell Reports — Vakoc’s team identify the proteins that determine whether pancreatic cancer cells retain their pancreatic identity or slip into a skin-cell-like state. They also highlight a different set of proteins with a pivotal role in tuft-cell lung cancer.

Proteins, of course, are specified by genetic information, and if that information is altered, so too is the protein’s function. In the language of ID creationists, proteins are products of “complex, specified genetic information”.

This presents intelligent design creationists with a familiar problem — one they usually address, as with parasites and pathogens, by ignoring it and relying on the scientific illiteracy of their followers. If complex, specified information were genuinely evidence of an intelligent designer, then that same designer would be implicated in the origin of the proteins that maintain and diversify cancers. Their “specified information” is neither less complex nor less specific than the proteins involved in cognition, immunity, or embryonic development.

Only by refusing to define “complex specificity” in scientific terms — or to explain how it might be distinguished from information that is supposedly non-complex or non-specified — do ID advocates manage to maintain the fiction that all beneficial traits are the work of their designer, while harmful traits must arise from some other agency. This selective attribution, based entirely on subjective human preference, underscores the religious foundations of intelligent design creationism and its distance from genuine science.

The team’s findings are summarised in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory news release by Jen A. Miller.

Unintelligent Design - How Wheat Could Have Been Designed To Give Tripple The Yield

A spike of wheat showing three grains clustered within each spikelet, where there is ordinarily just one.

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

Scientists Discover a Gene that Could Triple Wheat Production | College of Agriculture & Natural Resources at UMD

News that a single mutant gene could triple wheat yields raises some uncomfortable questions for Bible-literalist creationists, and indeed for anyone who believes their god created the Earth and all life on it exclusively for humans — its supposed favoured species, for whom “all of creation” was made.

This belief has profoundly shaped Western attitudes towards the planet and its resources. One consequence of this selfish worldview has been the destruction of vast areas of the Earth, its ecosystems, and the countless species that depend on them. In the relentless search for mineral wealth, cropland, and grazing land, humans have transformed immense regions into effective monocultures which, to anything not adapted to those particular crops, might as well be deserts. Moreover, the same belief — coupled with the idea that brown and black people were inferior to whites and therefore “created” to serve Europeans — helped justify imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

One question that creationists, in my experience, consistently shy away from is this: if an omniscient god truly created our domestic animals for our use, why have we almost always had to modify them through selective breeding to make them more useful? It’s as though this god didn’t actually know what we would need or how we would use these animals. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: why didn’t this supposedly omniscient being create ideal domestic plants and crops in the first place?

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Favoured The Naked Mole Rat

DNA repair mechanisms help explain why naked mole-rats live a long life

News that scientists have discovered what enables the naked mole-rat to live for up to 37 years — around ten times longer than relatives of a similar size — raises a troublesome question for creationists. The findings were reported recently in Science by a team of researchers from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Maternal Fetal Medicine.

Creationists like to flatter themselves with the notion that they are the favoured creation of their putative designer god and the ultimate expression of design perfection. So, when evidence emerges of other species surpassing humans in some way — bats with more robust immune systems, elephants and sharks being almost completely immune to cancers, peregrine falcons with far superior vision — it is typically ignored, met with incredulity, or dismissed as an ineffable mystery and part of some divine plan which in no way diminished the unique position of humans in the grand scheme.

Now, to add to their woes, comes the discovery that the secret of the naked mole-rat’s extraordinary longevity may be traced to changes in just four amino acids. This alone undermines creationist claims that mutations are always harmful and incapable of generating new genetic information.

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

An interesting open-access paper, recently published in the journal, Functional Ecology, by two researchers from Kobe University, Japan, explains the complex, symbiotic relationship between an orchid and a wood-decomposing fungus, not only between the fungi and the adult plants that depend on the fungi to provide the orchid with nutrients, but also for the orchid seed to germinate.

This complex relationship appears to benefit the orchid because it can live in otherwise nutrient-poor conditions. However, from an intelligent design perspective, it makes no sense at all because an omnipotent, omniscient designer could have endowed the orchid with the genetic machinery to do what the fungus does.

The relationship between the seeds and the fungus is even more bizarre. The seeds, unlike those of other plants, are devoid of nutrients and therefore need the fungus to supply some. Orchid seeds are notoriously small, being almost invisible to the naked eye. Contrary to Jesus’s bizarre reputed claim in the Bible that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, orchid seeds are orders of magnitude smaller.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Matthew 13: 31–32

The mustard seed is not only not the smallest of seeds but also doesn’t grow into a tree!

Contrary to what creationists have been conditioned to believe, one of the hallmarks of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity because the simpler a process is, the fewer opportunities there are for it to go wrong.

The converse is true for evolved organisms and processes because there is no plan or foresight in evolution, which can only build on what is already present, and natural selection prioritises utility, based solely on what is better than what preceded it. Consequently, evolved organisms are a collection of suboptimal compromises, and there is selection pressure to minimise failures with another layer of complexity.

This has led to confusion in creationist thinking, which associates complexity with intelligent design as they try to force-fit what can be observed with their need to have a role for their particular deity — especially in their own ‘design’ — giving them a sense of importance that being ‘merely’ the product of evolution doesn’t give them.

Uninteligent Design - How The Process of Germ Cell Production Goes Wrong And Creates Genetic Defects.

Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab

Left panel: short green irregular lines arranged in pairs. Right: Close up of one pair shows that the two strands form a cross shape. Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab.

Landmark Discovery Reveals How Chromosomes Are Passed From One Generation to the Next | UC Davis

This article continues my series exploring the many ways in which the human body demonstrates unintelligent design. Far from being the perfect handiwork of a benevolent creator, our anatomy and physiology are full of flaws, inefficiencies, and dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of these makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection—an opportunistic, short-term process that tinkers with existing structures—but they make no sense at all if we are supposed to be the product of an all-wise designer.

Creationists often argue from a position of ignorant incredulity, claiming that complexity implies intelligent design, when in fact the opposite is true. The hallmark of good, intelligent design is simplicity, for two very simple reasons: first, simple things are easier to construct and require fewer resources; and second, simple structures and processes have fewer potential points of failure, making them more reliable.

In short: complexity is evidence against intelligent design and in favour of a mindless, utilitarian, natural process such as evolution.

In addition to being minimally complex, another characteristic we would expect of something designed by an omniscient, maximally intelligent, and benevolent designer is that the process should work perfectly, every time, without fail.

The problem for creationists is that their favourite example of supposed intelligent design — the human body — is riddled with complexity in both its structures and processes. This complexity provides countless examples of systems that fail to perform adequately, or fail altogether, with varying frequency. Many failures occur in the layers of complexity needed to control or compensate for the inadequacies of other systems, and when those compensatory mechanisms themselves fail, the result can be a cascade of dysfunctions or processes running out of control. The consequences manifest as diseases, defects, and disabilities — hardly the work of an all-wise designer.

They are, however, exactly what we would expect from a mindless, utilitarian process like evolution, which prioritises short-term survival and reproduction, selecting only what is better — sometimes only marginally better — than what preceded it, rather than seeking optimal solutions. I have catalogued many such suboptimal compromises in the anatomy and physiology of the human body, and the problems that arise from them, in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, one of my Unintelligent Design series.

Just yesterday, I wrote about research suggesting that autism may be a by-product of the rapid evolution of intelligence in humans. Now we have another striking example of extreme biological complexity which, when it goes wrong, can have catastrophic consequences: the production of eggs in women and sperm cells in men.

Refuting Creationism - How Autism May Be The Result Of Compromise In The Evolution Of Human Intelligence

Trump 'fact checking' his autism claim

How evolution explains autism rates in humans | EurekAlert!

If the human genome had been intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent supernatural deity, as creationists insist, it should be perfect and free from defects of any sort. In fact, it is difficult to see why there would be any variance in such an intelligently designed genome, let alone variance that causes genetic defects—unless those were intentionally included by the designer, who then cannot reasonably be described as omnibenevolent or omniscient.

If, however, the human genome is the product of hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolutionary processes — processes that prioritise survival and reproduction, with all the sub-optimal compromises that a utilitarian form of ‘design’ entails — then variance and defects are exactly what we would expect.

Creationists traditionally ignore questions about the origin of variance in a supposedly ‘perfect’ intelligently designed genome. The existence of genetic defects is usually explained away by resorting to Bible-literalist mythology about ‘The Fall’ — an abandonment of the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy, which seeks to present creationism as real science rather than a fundamentalist religion dressed in a lab coat. News that autism may in fact be a by-product of the evolution of intelligence in humans will therefore be an even greater problem for creationists, who insist that our high intelligence sets us apart as the special creation of a perfect god.

Ironically, as well as possessing high intelligence, humans — unlike any other primates — also have autism and schizophrenia. It is this correlation that provides a clue to their shared evolutionary origins.

My book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design, lists lots of examples of how the human body is the result of these sub-optimal evolutionary compromises with all the problems that has produced. This example is just another instance and more evidence of the lack of intelligence in the process.