Unintelligent Design - A Bird-Brained Designer?

Birds Have Developed Complex Brains Independently from Mammals - campusa-magazine - UPV/EHU

You might expect an intelligent designer to use the same solution to the same problem. After all, no intelligent watchmaker would keep reinventing the movement he or she puts in watches. In fact, an expert horologist can look inside a good watch and tell you who make it, not because the maker's name is engraved inside the case but because the same watchmaker will have used the same design over and over again, maybe varying the outward appearance of the watch and adding some functions like date and phases of the moon, but the basic movement will be the same.

And this is how you can tell that whatever designed living organisms was not an intelligent designer, because whatever it is, it keeps designing different solutions to the same problems. For instance, having designed the basic vertebrate nervous system to have a brain at one end and a cord running through the spinal column, it would have used the same starting components when it came to giving some of those vertebrates the intelligence to make tools, solve puzzles and plan ahead.

Not so creationism's intelligent designer.

Like an amnesiac it seems to have forgotten whichever solution it designed first for the three vertebrate orders in which intelligence is to be found - birds, reptiles and mammals. Starting with the ancestral reptilian brain, the design process has produced two different ways of producing the pallium (the part of the brain responsible for cognition, learning and memory recall) in birds and mammals.

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer Muddles Through But Still Messes Up.

spB^d-II complex at average resolutions of 3.2 and 3.1 Å.

Quality control during splicing: When an error in the precursor mRNA is detected, the spliceosome is blocked, the recruited control factors interrupt the “normal” cycle, and a molecular short circuit causes the spliceosome to disassemble.

© K. Wild, K. Soni, I. Sinning.

Spliceosome: How Cells Avoid Errors When Manufacturing mRNA

Q. How can you tell when something is designed by a supreme intelligence with the inerrant ability of foresight?

A. It works perfectly, without errors and does exactly what it was intended to do, nothing more and nothing less.

Q. How can you tell when something is 'designed' by a natural, utilitarian process like evolution by natural selection?

A. It works most of the time, even if not very efficiently, is over-complex and so prone to errors and doesn't anticipate change. It also frequently requires additional layers of complexity to compensate for its errors and inefficiency.

Sadly for intelligent design advocates, structures and processes found in nature are almost never perfect and free from errors and, when examined closely, are seen to be error-prone, suboptimal and requiring additional complexity to compensate for the errors and inefficiencies. And these error-correction mechanisms are themselves error-prone and prone to failure.

One such mechanism, the details of which have just been worked out by researchers at the Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center (BZH) in collaboration with colleagues from the Australian National University, is the system of spliceosomes found in eukaryote cells, that correct the errors in messenger RNA (mRNA) before they are transcribed into functional proteins.

The reason these large nuclear proteins are required is because the DNA the mRNA is transcribed from is contains 'introns' - small sequences that are not part of the gene being coded for. Imagine a computer database of words, which, when a retrieved, inserts random letters in the middle of the word.

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Betwen The Sexes!

Females position their legs to make their bodies look more attractive to a male

Male flies' better vision called the females' bluff | University of Gothenburg

When dance flies mate, females make themselves more attractive by swallowing air and laying their hairy legs along their bodies to look like they are full of eggs. New research shows that the males have developed better eyesight, probably to detect the deception.

As I showed in my books, The unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax and Unintelligently Designed Arms Races: How Nature Refutes Intelligent Design, the natural arms races that are ubiquitous in nature make no sense as the work of an intelligence. It is simply not an intelligent act to have an ultimately pointless arm race with yourself.

Arms races happen because one side doesn't know the other side's next move but falling behind could be ultimately fatal. Both sides have no option but to use the 'Red Queen strategy' of running ever faster just to stand still. It makes as much sense as playing poker with yourself. As the act of an intelligence, it would mean the designer sees the solution to yesterdays' problem as today's problem to be solved. It probably tells us a great more than they might wish us to know that creationists think this is a sign of supreme intelligence.
The latest such arms race to be revealed by science makes even less sense from an intelligent design perspective if that's possible. This one is an arms race between the sexes in an order of insects known as dance flies and is the result of the two different strategies the males and females use to ensure they get the best mate and so produce the fittest offspring.

Dance flies are (mostly) predatory flies that kill and eat other insects. To attracts a female, males perform a dance with other males in a flying display. The females attract a male by showing him her abdomen in full of eggs and she is ready to be inseminated. The male then pursues the female and presents her with a dead insect as food. She then allows him to mate with her. They will then go off and repeat the mating rituals so both will mate with multiple partners. The female then lays her fertilised eggs in damp soil where they hatch and live as larvae and pupa until ready to hatch and repeat the cycle.

It is in the females reproductive interest to attract the fittest males and she does this by flying in front of him to display a large body full of eggs, while the male concentrates his efforts of pursuing the female most likely to produce a large batch of eggs, and presenting her with a nutritious meal in return for mating with her.

Unintelligent Design - Sex Determination in Octopuses - For 480 Million Years

Californian two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides

Californian two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides

Octopuses have some of the oldest known sex chromosomes | OregonNews

Although few of them will know enough to understand why, the genetic basis for sex determination in different organisms is a problem for intelligent design advocates because it illustrates a few embarrassing things which can't be explained as the design of an intelligent designer.

Firstly, there are several ways in which gender is determines, rather than the single method a single intelligent designer of all living things would have settled for (see the AI information panel). Secondly, the actual basis is consistent within major clades such as mammals, birds and orders of insects such as Hymenoptera (Bees, wasps and ants), and thirdly, because the methods are unstable over evolutionary time, since the sex chromosomes are unpaired in the heterozygous gender, so the unpaired chromosome tends to acquire mutations, which are not corrected by cross over during meiosis, and the non-sex-determining genes tend to be conserved on the chromosome which is paired in the homozygous gender.

In mammals, this means that the Y-chromosome tends to degenerate; in some species of rodents, which have a short generation time and large litters, so evolution can progress faster than in most other mammals, the Y-chromosome has disappeared, to be replaced by an alternative sex-determining system. No intelligent designer worthy of the name would design a process that degenerates and need to be replaced every few million years.

Unintelligent Design - Vestigial 'Fossil' Ear Muscles Still Try to Function

Muscles of the head

AI-generated image (with AI spelling)

Muscles of the ear

Image by BioDigital, edited by Lecturio

‘A neural fossil’: human ears try to move when listening, scientists say | Biology | The Guardian

In my book, The Body Of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design I list very many examples of the sort of design only a fool would produce - examples of sub-optimal compromises in structures and processes that could have been less error-prone and more efficient in terms of resource use or function.

These also included vestigial structures and system that still exist, sometime causing problems such as appendicitis when the functionless appendix becomes infected, and the wasted metabolism in making all the tiny hairs on your body stand up in cold weather using the tiny arrector pili muscles and the autonomic nerves that supply them.

Now we have another example, involving the superior and posterior auricular muscles that once moved the ears in a remote simian ancestor, but now only serve as party tricks for the few of us that can wiggle our ears.

Unitelligent Design - How The Giant Clam Has a Needlessly Complex Way To Get Nutrients

Giant clams have colourful mantles.

Ruiqi Li/CU Boulder

How tiny algae shaped the evolution of giant clams | CU Boulder Today | University of Colorado Boulder

You can depend on creationism's idiot designer to never do something the obvious uncomplicated way when there is an obscure and much more complicated way to achieve the same result. It's almost exactly like it's a mindless fool, blundering about without a plan who sometimes happens across something that works and sticks with it, trying to make the best of it with more blundering.

Quite the opposite of what anyone other than a creationist would call intelligent, in fact.

For example, having designed a giant clam to live in nutrient poor coral reefs, it then designed them to have algae living symbiotically inside them, supplementing their megre diet got by filtering the seawater, with sugars manufactured by photosynthesis. This enables the giant clam to grow up to 4.5 feet (1.4 metres) in length and weigh over 700 pound (317 Kg).

Any intelligent designer could have either designed them to live in a less nutrient-poor environment or given them the chloroplasts the algae have to achieve the same result far more simply.

But of course, the giant clam wasn't intelligently designed; it evolved by the utilitarian evolutionary process that is constrained by its evolutionary history and so finds suboptimal but functional processes that a needlessly complex. This complexity impresses creationists because, not understanding how evolution works, they imagine it reflects intelligent design, instead of refuting it.

New Book - The Intelligent Design Advocate's Handbook

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Ever since teaching creationism in public schools in the USA was found to violate the Establishment Clause, by the Supreme Court in Edwards V. Aguillard (1987) the Discovery Institute has been following the "Wedge Strategy" to try to insert Christiaon fundamentalism into all aspects of American cultural, political and scientific life, using the notion of Intelligent Design as the thin end of the wedge. A campaign with the aim of nothing short of the removal of the Establishment Clause and the dismantling of Thomas Jefferson's Wall of separtion between church and state' as a precondition for establishing a Christian theocracy in the USA.

The thrust of this strategy is to try to cast doubt on the scientific validity of 'Darwinism', i.e., the Theory of Evolution, by misrepresenttion, misinformation and downright lies, to present Intelligent Design creationism as a genuine alternative scientific explanation for biodiversity, a strategy that relies on the false dichotomy fallacy that if evolution is false, creationism wins by default.

How they have been persuing this strategy is exposed in this AI-generated spoof ID advocates handbook, based on a systematic analysis and distillation of the tricks, lies and disinformation promulgated by ID advocates under the leadership of the Discovery Institute over several decade, which has become more concerted since the movement lost badly in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in which ID was exposed as creationism in a lab coat. In that trial, leading ID advocate, Professor Michael J. Behe, whose views have been repudiated by his colleagues at Lehigh University Biological Science Department, was forced to admit under oath that ID is science in the same way that alchemy and astrology are science, and that:

There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.

Professor Michael J. Behe
Kitzmiller v. Dover, Day 12 Am Session

Unintelligent Design - Creationism's Designer Tries Again, and Fails, Five Times

Barbourofelis in its native Miocene habitat

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

New research reveals why sabre-toothed predators evolved their deadly teeth

Creationism's designer god is nothing if not a trier - or maybe it’s just a slow learner. It tried and failed five times to create carnivores with ferocious-looking but ultimately fatal, sabre teeth.

The problem with long, curved canine teeth is that, although they are good at killing big animals quickly by tearing their throat out or stabbing them to death, because of the additional leverage on the long teeth, and the high risk of striking bone, they are prone to break, leaving their owner to starve to death.

And this has happened at least five times in evolutionary history.

The problem is there is an optimal size and shape depending in the prey species but this produces selection pressure to become more specialised in the prey which in turn produces selection pressure to produce longer, sharper teeth until the tooth shape reaches a pinnacle of shape optimised for that particular prey species. However, there is an evolutionary trade-off in that as the teeth become more specialised, the carnivore becomes more specialised and dependent on the prey species, so they are vulnerable to ecological changes that mean their prey becomes scarce of goes extinct.

How and why this occurred repeatedly due to convergent evolution is the subject of a paper in Current Biology and an open access article in The Conversation by Dr. Tahlia Pollock, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Evans EvoMorph Laboratory, Monash University. Her article is reprinted here, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Oldest-Known Evolutionary Arms Race in the Cambrian

Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Oldest-Known Evolutionary “Arms Race” in the Cambrian | AMNH

Examples of Lapworthella fasciculata shells (under scanning electron microscope) from the Mernmerna Formation, Flinders Ranges, South Australia showing holes made by a perforating predator. Scale bars represent 200 micrometers.

R. Bicknell, et al (2025)

Perhaps Creationism's designer god is just a slow learner.

Anyone with an intellect greater than that of a plank should be capable of understanding the utter futility and waste in an arms race in which the strategy is to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. Arms races only make sense as the result of a game plan in which you can't communicate with your opponent and have no way of telling what he or she is thinking and if they gain the upper-hand, you lose. The only safe choice is to up the stakes - and that goes for your opponent too.

It becomes even more incomprehensible if the person you're having the arms race with is yourself, unless you're an amnesic with multiple personality disorder, and yet, if we believe creationists, that's exactly what their putative designer god is doing constantly.

Everywhere we look in nature, organisms are competing with one another for resources, or because one is trying to exploit the other as a food source in a predator-prey relationship or as a parasite trying to live in or on another organism and even killing it or making it weak and sickly as a byproduct of its parasitism. And yet creationists insist there is only one designer designing both sides in these arms races.

For some unfathomable reason, creationists like to imagine the idea of a celestial idiot having arms races with itself in millions of relationships in nature is a much better explanation than these arms races being the inevitable result of mindless evolutionary processes where a slight improvement increases the chances of leaving descendants while reducing the chance of the opponent doing the same, so creating a selection pressure for the next twist in the spiral.

Unintelligent Design - How Evolution Rescued an Unintelligent Heath-Robinson Design Blunder

A WashU researcher hand pollinates Arabidopsis.

Photo: Joe Angeles/WashU

How plants evolved multiple ways to override genetic instructions - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis

The thing about evolution that distinguishes it from intelligent design is that evolution is utilitarian. It settles for something that works better than what preceded it, which is different from designing a perfect solution to a problem. Near enough is good enough because anything which is an improvement gets pushed up the frequency listing in the gene pool. So, organisms over time have accumulated sub-optimal systems that sometimes fail and cause other problems.

One of those systems is the way DNA is replicated - which is so error prone that error correction mechanisms have evolved over time, but they don't always work either, so we have the phenomenon of the 'jumping genes' that get inserted in the wrong place in the genome, sometime in the middle of a functional gene or in a control section adjacent to a functional gene, causing genetic defects.

So, in the best Heath-Robinson approach to design, rather than abandoning that design and starting again, the way any intelligent designer would do, another layer of complexity is needed to try to mitigate the occasion when the system fails.

So, what organisms have evolved over the years is a process for neutralising these 'jumping genes' by attaching methyl groups to one of the bases which prevents it being transcribed. This is a part of the epigenetic system by which the specialised cells of multicellular organisms turn of unwanted genes and only allow the genes for their speciality to be active - a layer of complexity needed because the way cells replicate was inherited from their single-celled ancestors where the whole genome needs to be included in every daughter cell.

Animals, such as mammals have two enzymes which attach this methyl group depending on the DNA 'context', but plants have multiple enzymes for doing the same thing. The question is why do plants need these multiple enzymes?

Malevolent Design - How Sleeping Sickness Parasites Are 'Designed' to Evade Our Immune System

Trypanosoma brucei

Sleeping sickness

Discovery Illuminates How Sleeping Sickness Parasite Outsmarts Immune Response | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health

Trypanosoma brucei is a blood-borne eukaryote parasite that should leave believers in an intelligent designer, open-mouthed in admiration for its inventive genius. Christian fundamentalist creationists of the white supremacist persuasion should also admire the racist that, through T. brucei, has managed to keep large parts of Africa technologically under-developed due to the difficult in maintaining herds of domestic animals where the vector of these parasites - the tsetse fly - is common.

As a vector, the tsetse fly is a triumph of malevolent design which I mentioned in my popular book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, but it would have been all for nothing without the nasty little T. brucei to cause sleeping sickness in humans and the debilitating disease "nagana" in cattle.

What creationist admires of the divine malevolence they believe designs these things should now be marveling at is the sheer brilliance of the design by which it manages to evade the immune system, which they believe was created by the same designer god which now regards his design as a problem to be overcome oh parasites like T. brucei can continue making Africans and their cattle sick.

Unintelligent Design - The Blunder That Causes Cancers

Ludwig Cancer Research

It has often been a theme of my blog posts how, if we regard cells as the result of conscious (I won't use the term 'intelligent' as that's singularly inappropriate, as we shall see) design then the picture quickly emerges of a bungling incompetent, cobbling together Heath-Robinson solutions to problems of its own incompetent making and lack of foresight.

The entire system of epigenetics, for example, is only necessary in a multicellular organism with its cell specialisation because specialised cells only need a small subset of the entire genome, yet, because cells replicate using exactly the same process that single-celled organisms use, where the entire genome needs to be replicated in every daughter cell, the cells of multicellular organisms such as humans each receive the entire species genome. So, most of it needs to be turned off.

This is where the epigenetic system comes in where methyl groups are attached to key bases in the DNA which prevents that section being transcribed into RNA, effectively switching the gene off. There are other components to the epigenetic system, but that is the pertinent component as far as this particular blunder is concerned.

The problem starts when a methyl group is attached to a cytosine base (C in the CGTA genetic code) which is next to a guanine(G) base.

Unintelligent Design - How Creationism's 'Designer' Needs Plan B For When Plan A Fails To Mend Its Previous Design Blunder

Plants like Arabidopsis, seen here, have two options to ensure accurate chromosome division—a molecule called DDM1 and a process known as RNAi. If Arabidopsis loses one of these, it’s fine. But if it loses both, it’s in trouble.

Developmental defects of double, triple and quadruple mutants in RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (rdr1, rdr2, rdr6) and DNA methylation (ddm1) in floral organ identity, leaf shape and fertility (silique length).

Shimada, A., et al (2024)

Plants have a backup plan | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The secret to being a good designer or planner is to always have a Plan B. I say that as a former emergency operations centre manager where the future is unpredictable, so I needed to keep as many options open as possible because, as I used to joke, my Plan B was to tear up Plan A and start again.

Now, you can play the percentages game, for example, I could be fairly sure town centres would be fairly busy around 11 pm, especially on a Friday and Saturday night, when in the UK the pubs close, or as we call it, 'chucking out time', and a lot of inebriated people would be out on the streets, fighting over available taxis, over girl/boyfriends or who had got served at the bar out of turn (queue-jumping is a big no-no in the UK).

I also knew from 17 years operational experience that most of the calls would require little more than smoothing ruffled feathers, running checks to exclude underlying medical problems and sending them on their way, so turnover time would be relatively short, and I would get a crew back fairly quickly.

Another peak would be around 1 am when the nightclubs closed, but with a few exceptions such as those the rest of the week would resemble a system in chaos where medical emergencies, traffic accidents and every other imaginable emergency occurred more or less randomly, with statistical patterns only being noticeable over time with a sufficiently large database.

Later on, I became the data analyst who looked for those patterns and used them to devise deployment plans to minimise average emergency response times, but that's another story.

Juggling acts were the daily routine for an emergency operations centre like mine, as we tried to maintain as much emergency cover as possible while getting help to people who needed it as quickly as possible. And you never knew you had made the right decision until it turned out not to have been the wrong one.

Our major handicap was of course being unable to accurately forecast the future, not just weeks or days ahead but hours and minutes. What we singularly lacked was omniscience for which educated guesses were a poor substitute.

So, to a creationist it might come as something of a shock to learn that their putative designer behaves like a designer/planner who can't foretell the future because, if nothing else, it is allegedly omniscient, and its designs are perfect. As such it shouldn't need a Plan B because Plan A will be perfectly designed for the precise future needs of the species. There should never be an occasion where it needs to tear up Plan A and starts again; it shouldn’t need to consult a large database to look for patterns then work out the probability of that pattern repeating itself and planning its responses accordingly, never knowing if it was the right plan until it turned out not to be.

And yet a team of researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, USA has found that the plant, Arabidopsis has a Plan B for when Plan A fails. Plan A is all about making the ramshackle, Heath Robinson process for ensuring mistakes in DNA replication get attended to. In a design which seems to be a characteristic of creationism putative intelligent [sic] designer, a shoddy process needs another layer of complexity to try to make it works, but even that fix breaks and the result of growth defects, sterility and, in many cases in animals, cancers or developmental disorders.

Unintelligent Designe - Creationism's Blundering Heath-Robinson 'Designer' Strikes Again - And Causes Cancer

Broken DNA and lncRNA repair mechanism

AI generated image (CHATGPT4o)

Intelligently designed apparatus for teaching mountaineers.

William Heath-Robinson

How Cells Recognize and Repair DNA Damage -

One thing you can depend on with creationism's putative designer is that there will never be a simple solution when there is a more complicated way to solve the problem it just created, and just like William Heath-Robinson, it will try to use pre-existing structures that were designed for an entirely different function, like a pile of books under the legs of a ladder to make it tall enough, and every piece of string holding things together will have knots in it.

And when we look beneath the superficial resemblance of design in, for example, a living cell, we find all manner of if-it-works-it'll-do solutions to problems, like the solution to the problem of breaking DNA that a team of scientists, led by Kaspar Burger, from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, have discovered.

The problem arises of course because the method for replicating DNA as cells divide is poorly designed and unnecessarily complicated in the first place. If the putative designer had devised a more sensible method for replicating cells in multicellular organisms than that used for replicating single cells where the whole genome needs to be replicated, many of the problems of erroneous copying wouldn't arise because only a small subset of the genome is needed for specialised cells.

Malevolent Designer News - Why Cholera is So Good at Killing Us

Vibrio cholerae

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

Vibrio cholerae

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

News - Experts discover the deadly genetics of cholera, which could be key to its prevention - University of Nottingham

Although good hygiene and safe drinking water have most brought cholera under control in developed societies, it is still a major kill, especially of children, in poor and technologically under-developed countries.

It was a cholera outbreak of 1849 in Soho, London, the John Snow famously showed was statistically linked to drinking water from a well in Broad Steet, eventually persuading the authorities to remove the pump handle from the well, so ending the epidemic, that Snow conformed the Germ Theory of disease and founded modern epidemiology.

The cause was later shown to be a leaking septic tank which was contaminating the water in the well, and more remotely to a baby which caught cholera elsewhere whose nappy (diaper) was washed into the sewer, introducing the Vibrio cholerae into the septic tank.

I was born and brought up in North Oxfordshire in a rural community where, a generation earlier, cholera had been the single most common cause of death of children. A perusal of the parish burial registers shows regular patterns of epidemics causing a sudden increase in child deaths.

Even in technologically advanced countries, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and man-made conflicts such as those currently in Gaza and Ukraine can destroy the infrastructure and quickly lead to conditions in which cholera can further devastate an already weakened population.

It would be an especially despicable malevolence that designed an organism to exploit people in those situation to ensure there was even more suffering, but those subscribing to the intelligent design hoax are unwittingly attributing exactly that to their putative designer god.

Malevolent Designer News - How A Parasitic Wasp Targets Adult Fruit Flies

Syntretus perlmani grub emerging from the side of a fruit fly

Scale bar: 1mm

Newly-discovered parasitoid wasp, Syntretus perlmani. Scale bar: 1mm.

Moore, L.D., Chris Amuwa, T., Shaw, S.R. et al. (2024)

New species of wasp ‘hidden in plain sight’ discovered by MSU researchers | Mississippi State University

The world of parasites is a world that creationists need to turn a blind eye to (and not one blinded by a parasitic worm) because it contains abundant examples of how an intelligence that designed parasites can only be regarded as some sort of malevolent sadist who designs ways to make living things suffer, often horribly and in especially ghoulish ways - the sort of ways that only a sick mind could dream up.

Creationist cult leaders are also probably reticent about discussing parasites, given their parasitic lifestyle, but that’s a different matter.

Within the world of parasites, there are fewer better examples of the casual cruelty that characterises it than those of the many parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs in the living bodies of their host species, where their larvae feed on the body of the host, often only killing it at the last moment and sometimes manipulating its victim or reanimating its dead body to protect the parasites within it.

Very many of these parasitoid wasps attack the larvae of other insects and gain the protection of the eventual cocoon their host makes before dying, so the wasp's reproductive cycle is linked to that of its host species.

Unintelligent Design - How Japanese Eels Are Designed To Escape From the Stomach Of Fish Designed To Eat Them

Juvenile Japanese Eel, Anguilla japonica

Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica

How Japanese eels escape from their predator's stomach | ScienceDaily

If creationism’s putative intelligent [sic] designer set out to show how stupid it can be, it would be hard pressed to come up with something as bizarre as designing a fish to eat eels, then designing eels to be able to escape from the stomach of the predators designed to eat them.

And yet creationists must believe that's exactly what their hyper-intelligent, omniscient god has done, according to the discovery of a team of researchers from the Graduate School of Fisheries and Environmental Sciences, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan.

According to their report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, juvenile Japanese eels, Anguilla japonica, can escape from the stomach of the predatory fish Odontobutis obscura by travelling back up the fish's oesophagus and out through a gill slit.

Refuting Creationism - Co-Evolution Of Humans And Their Gut Microbiome

Development of the infant gut microbiome

AI generated image
(complete with spelling idiosyncrasies)

Natural probiotic discovered in UK newborns’ microbiomes

In a very nice example of how humans and their gut microbiome have co-evolved, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London (UCL), and the University of Birmingham, have identified a bacterium that helps digest breast milk and protects the baby from harmful pathogens.

As an example of intelligent [sic] design, this comes as close to a Heath-Robinson solution to a problem of the designer's own making as it's possible to imagine.

No designer who designed a baby's digestive system so it is susceptible to the harmful pathogens that it also designed, and created the baby to feed on breast milk that is difficult to digest, then solved those problems by creating another bacterium to fight the pathogens and help digest the milk, and infecting the baby with it, doesn't deserve the adjective 'intelligent'. 'Bloody stupid' would be a more appropriate term.

It's almost exactly as though the designer of these systems is a mindless automaton, simply obeying the natural laws of chemistry and physics and working without a plan!

The researchers have completed the largest study of UK baby microbiomes to date, carrying out whole genome sequencing to analyse stool samples from 1,288 healthy infants, all under one month old from the UK Baby Biome Study^1.1.

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

[left caption]

[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.