Unintelligent Design - A Bacterium That Goes Wrong And Self-Destructs

SAR11 bacteria comprise some 40% of marine bacterial cells, making them an essential part of our ocean ecosystems.

Image source: Smithsonian / Xiaowei Zhao.

One of Earth’s most abundant organisms is surprisingly fragile

Microbiologists at the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered that one of Earth’s most abundant species, the SAR11 bacterium, has a fundamental — and potentially fatal — ‘design’ flaw. They have just published their findings in Nature Microbiology, and it should make grim reading for any creationists with sufficient courage to read it.

When you have trillions of copies, what does it matter to ‘selfish’ genes if a few billion go wrong and end up destroying the organisms they travel through time in? For an evolved organism, it matters not one tittle or jot to its genes, because they can always produce more copies. So long as there is a sufficiently large population to keep replicating, they will continue to exist and reproduce — and they have no other ultimate function. This is all they evolved to do.

But could we say the same for an organism designed by an omniscient, intelligent designer? What would be intelligent about creating an organism that, under particular but entirely predictable conditions, attempts to reproduce but succeeds only in making repeated copies of its DNA, fails to divide, and enters a runaway cycle of replication until it becomes so disorganised that it can no longer survive and effectively self-destructs?

SAR11 dominates the surface waters of the world’s oceans and accounts for around 40% of marine bacterial cells. As such, it is a vital component at the base of the marine food chain, and is so successful partly because of a process known as genetic streamlining — the evolutionary loss of genes to reduce energy demands in nutrient-poor environments. This alone is not the main problem for creationists to explain, although it does raise the obvious question of why a designer would burden an organism with a genetic load it does not need in the first place.

The real problem is that this streamlining, as an evolved process, comes at a cost. In shedding a load of mostly surplus genes, some essential ones are lost too — including genes that regulate the cell cycle. The result is a failure to divide after genome replication, with the cell instead entering an uncontrolled loop of DNA replication without division.

How on Earth can that be regarded as intelligent design? The organism does exactly what it is ‘designed’ to do under conditions of low nutrient stress, but in doing so falls into an inescapable trap. The consequence is that populations continue to decline even when nutrients later become available again — with potentially serious knock-on effects for other species higher up the food chain.

Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Ecosystem reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry around 150 million years ago in Colorado, the United States

Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

AI-generate image (ChatGPT5.2)

Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Unintelligent Design - One Design Blunder Led To Another And Ended Up Causing Cancer - Or Was It Deliberate?

A broken DNA repair tool accelerates aging | News from Goethe University Frankfurt

Researchers from Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, have shown how a faulty DNA repair mechanism triggers inflammation and leads to accelerated ageing, developmental abnormalities, and cancer.

Their findings are published in Science.

As I explained in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Exposing the Intelligent Design Hoax, one of the hallmarks of an evolved system — and one which creationists have been conditioned to mistake for evidence of intelligent design — is complexity. In reality, the opposite is true: intelligently designed objects and processes are typically *minimally

complex, doing exactly what is required and no more.

One reason complexity arises in evolved systems is the need for additional layers of processes to compensate for the suboptimal designs that evolution inevitably produces. An intelligently designed process — especially one devised by a designer endowed with foresight — would require no such compensatory mechanisms. It would function reliably every time and be robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and other causes of malfunction. Nor would a perfectly designed copying process be prone to copying errors.

What we observe in reality, however, is an excessively complex system that still malfunctions — and when it does, it can do so unpredictably and catastrophically, leading to increased suffering and even death. The equivalent, in engineering terms, would be an aircraft manufacturer producing planes that were mostly safe most of the time, yet costly to build because they relied on intricate back-up systems to compensate for other components prone to failure — and which nevertheless suffered unpredictable mid-flight failures when those back-ups failed, causing aircraft to fall from the sky. Such an incompetent aircraft manufacturer would not remain in business for long.

In contrast to evolved systems which are overly complex and still prone to errors, an intelligently designed organism would be minimally complex, maximally efficient, robust enough to withstand environmental stressors and work perfectly every time. As so often, what ID predicts is not what we actually observe. In normal science, the falsification of a hypothesis is regarded as confirmation that the hypothesis was wrong, but in creationism the reverse holds; if the facts fail to confirm the hypothesis the facts must be wrong. The hypothesis must be clung to with grim determination, come what may.

Malevolent Design - How The Toxoplasma Parasite Looks Intelligently Designed - To A Creationist

Toxoplasma gondii cyst in brain cell.

A) Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites, the rapidly multiplying form of the parasite. B) A bradyzoite cyst containing Toxoplasma gondii within a muscle fiber, showing the cyst wall and individual bradyzoites. C) Histological section of tissue with Toxoplasma gondii cysts. D) Microscopic image of a Toxoplasma gondii oocyst, responsible for environmental transmission.

source.

Scientists find hidden diversity inside common brain parasite | UCR News | UC Riverside

Another example of a nasty little parasite that bears all the hallmarks of the Discovery Institute’s supposed *“proof”* of intelligent design was unveiled today, when scientists from the University of California, Riverside published the results of their investigation into the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which infects up to a third of the global population. Their paper was published open access in Nature Communications. It has been released unedited to provide early access to the findings.

Ask Discovery Institute (DI) fellow Michael J. Behe for proof of intelligent design and he will produce multiple examples of what he terms “irreducible complexity”, claiming that such systems could not have evolved step by step and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural intelligent designer. Similarly, ask another DI fellow, William A. Dembski, for proof of intelligent design and he will produce examples of what he calls “complex specified genetic information”, which he claims likewise could not have evolved naturally and therefore must have been provided by a supernatural designer.

Curiously, however, when biologists point to examples of “irreducible complexity” or “complex specified genetic information” in pathogens or parasites — organisms whose sole apparent purpose is to make us ill or kill us, or at the very least to increase suffering in the world - as evidence that, if the ID creationists’ argument were granted, it would imply malevolent intent on the part of the intelligent designer, the response is either silence or retreat into theology. More often than not, the blame is shifted to “the Fall”, while the insistence remains that intelligent design is a genuine scientific alternative to “Darwinism”, and not merely Bible-literalist Christian fundamentalism under another name.

At this point, their supposed “proof” of intelligent design quietly evaporates. Behe will even attempt to argue that the random process he calls “genetic entropy” is responsible, thereby conceding that random processes can generate what Dembski describes as complex specified genetic information — while simultaneously insisting that such information cannot have evolved through random processes at all.

The UC Riverside team have now shown that Toxoplasma gondii is even more complex than previously thought. It was already known that the parasite invades the brain and other tissues, where it forms dormant cysts that can later be reactivated. Its preferred hosts are members of the cat family, and humans are most commonly infected via cats. In some secondary hosts, it has been shown to manipulate behaviour in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by a cat, thereby completing its life cycle. Infected mice, for example, actively seek out the presence of domestic cats, while chimpanzees develop a fascination with the scent of leopard urine. It is possible that effects observed in humans are an echo of this behaviour-modifying mechanism inherited from our evolutionary past.

The new research shows that these cysts are far more complex than simple dormant copies of the parasite. Instead, they are intricate assemblages of multiple sub-types, each with distinct biological functions. In this respect, the cyst exhibits some of the characteristics of a multicellular organism, including a degree of cellular specialisation.

Malevolent Design - The Brain-Eating Amoeba is Coming To A Pond Near You!

Invisible but deadly: Scientists warn of a growing global threat from amoebae in water and the environment | EurekAlert!

In a recent paper published in Biocontaminant, a group of environmental and public health scientists from China and the United States warn of the growing threat to public health from a group of dangerous free-living single-celled amoebae, the most notorious of which is Naegleria fowleri, also known as the brain-eating amoeba.

This complex, eukaryotic organism bears all the hallmarks of what Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe insist is compelling evidence for intelligent design — complex specified genetic information and irreducible complexity — so, if we accept their argument, we have to conclude that whatever designer they imagine is doing this designing must also be the one who designed these nasty little ways to make people sick and die by having their brains eaten, like in some grotesque zombie apocalypse.

This pathogenic amoeba is not new — I wrote about it in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature’s God is not Good, page 33, based on a blog post I originally wrote in 2015. Since then, assisted by global warming, ageing water-supply infrastructure, and a lack of effective monitoring, the amoeba has become a global threat to public health.

N. fowleri normally lives in soil and water, where it feeds on bacteria and other micro-organisms, but if it manages to get into a victim’s nose it can track along the olfactory nerves to the brain, where it treats brain cells the way it treats soil-borne organisms and sets about eating them. Infections are almost invariably fatal. What makes them particularly dangerous is their ability to survive extreme conditions that would kill most micro-organisms, such as high temperatures and strong disinfectants like chlorine, so they can persist in water supplies that most people regard as safe.

An additional hazard is that these amoebae can also act as carriers for other pathogens such as Legionella pneumophila, Chlamydia, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. By providing these pathogens with protection from disinfection, the amoeba can enhance their pathogenicity and prolong their survival in the environment.

It would be hard to find a better example than N. fowleri of what creationists insist must be intelligently designed, so it follows that there are probably few better examples of the sheer malevolent evil of any designer of such creatures, from the perspective of the humans infected with it. For creationists to retreat into the traditional excuse of blaming ‘the Fall’ is to abandon the claim that irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information are definitive evidence of intelligent design, and to retreat instead into religious fundamentalism and Bible literalism.

Unintelligent Design - Why Some People Suffer More From The Common Cold Than Others - Incompetent or Malevolent Design - Or Evolution?

Electron micrograph showing a human nasal epithelial cell releasing rhinovirus (blue).

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang

Electron micrograph of differentiated human nasal epithelial organoids with cilia of multiciliated cells accentuated in blue.

Credit: Julien Amat, Bao Wang.

Why the same cold can be a sniffle for some and a crisis for others | Yale News

You might expect an intelligently designed system, created by an omnibenevolent designer, to work just as effectively for everybody and not badly for some and only just adequately for others. And yet, as so often with creationism, the facts are not at all what the theory predicts. In science this would be called falsification, but for creationists it is just another inconvenient fact to be ignored or blamed on ‘the Fall’ — or even on the victim.

According to a paper just published in Cell Press Blue, the reason some people suffer more from a cold caused by a rhinovirus is not so much because of differences in the virus, but because their bodies react differently. Some take control and prevent the spread of viruses to adjacent cells of the mucous membrane lining the nasal passages, whereas other people’s bodies fail to prevent the virus spreading.

The paper is by a team at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA, led by Associate Professor Dr Ellen F. Foxman, PhD.

By growing organoids in vitro and infecting them with rhinoviruses, the team were able to show that whether the infection spreads depends on how quickly the infected cells are able to mount an interferon response. A good response limits the infection to just a few cells and the cold does not develop beyond a ‘sniffle’. Where the response is weak, the infection spreads and, in cases where the victim has an underlying respiratory condition such as asthma or COPD, the cold can develop into a serious illness.

Why the interferon response differs between individuals is not known with any certainty, but it could be due to a number of factors, including genetics. However, it is known that in patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions, the interferon response is inhibited.

That, of course, begs the question for ID creationists: why a system supposedly designed to protect us gets downgraded when it is most needed, and, if the difference is due to underlying genetics, why some people got better genes in this respect than others. Under the ID creationist paradigm, genes that produce any given output are deemed to hold ‘complex specified genetic information’ and, as such, are evidence for intelligent design.

Leaving aside the question of why any omnibenevolent designer would design viruses to make us sick and then design an immune response to prevent them doing so, we are left with the question of why this immune system does not always work very well and why some people have a worse version than others. If an omnibenevolent designer can design an effective immune system, why did it not give it to everyone? Does it actually want those people to suffer more from the viruses it supposedly designed?

The evolutionary explanation is, of course, straightforward, with none of the theological conundrums that plague creationism. Evolution does not seek out perfection and has no interest in equity. In the environment of an evolutionary arms race with viruses, the results are inevitably suboptimal and unevenly distributed throughout the population unless there is particularly strong selection pressure to drive the ‘best’ solution to fixation. It is also in the survival interests of viruses to tone down their victim’s responses, thereby reducing that selection pressure. The resulting trade-off and compromise is what we see today in the different responses to the same virus.

Malevolent Design - Creationists Dogged By Parasites Again - Evolution or Malevolence?

Cross section of a dog's heart showing heartworm.

The University of Sydney

Ancient ‘spaghetti’ in dogs’ hearts reveals surprising origins of heartworm | EurekAlert!

An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, have just published a paper in Communications Biology which reshapes our understanding of a widespread canine parasitic nematode, the heartworm, Dirofilaria immitis. It is also more bad news for creationists, and for the intelligent design cult in particular.

In particular, the team have shown that this parasite has probably been co-evolving with dogs since before they were domesticated. It had previously been assumed that human activity was responsible for the spread of these worms.

Applying all the criteria traditionally cited by ID creationists as ‘proof’ of intelligent design, any designer of this parasite emerges as a grotesque malevolence determined to make dogs suffer. There is also the problem, for ID creationists, of clear evidence of a co-evolutionary arms race — the hallmark of mindless evolution and the antithesis of intelligent design.

Heartworms are complex organisms, with a complex life cycle involving both the primary host — dogs — and a vector — mosquitoes — all of which must be present for the parasite to survive, thus conforming neatly to Michael J. Behe’s supposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: irreducible complexity. There is also evidence of resistance both to the dog’s immune system and, more recently, to the veterinary drugs used to treat the infection, conforming equally well to William A. Dembski’s proposed ‘evidence for intelligent design’: complex specified genetic information. So, within the ID paradigm, the conclusion becomes unavoidable — heartworms have been intelligently designed and are being actively redesigned in order to continue making dogs suffer and to stay ahead in their arms race with veterinary science.

But of course, the biological evidence shows that these parasites are the product of a co-evolutionary process in which neither magic nor intent were involved. Nematode genes have no concern for the suffering they cause, nor for whether their host lives or dies, so long as it survives long enough to pass the parasites on to the next generation of dogs.

Although the evidence conforms exactly to what the Theory of Evolution predicts — and evolution remains the most parsimonious explanation, absolving any deities of responsibility — for some inexplicable reason the ID cult would prefer people to believe that these, and thousands of other parasites, were the handiwork of their favourite deity, who thus emerges as a divine malevolence; a complete contrast to the supposedly omnibenevolent god of the holy books that creationists worship.

Creationism Refuted - How New Genetic Information Causes Diseases

Study shows your genes determine how fast your DNA mutates with age | UCLA Health

Creationist dogma insists that new genetic information can only be created by their putative intelligent designer, so it should be deeply embarrassing for them to learn that certain stretches of our DNA lengthen as we age, that the rate at which this happens is influenced by genes, and that excessive expansion of these sequences can lead to serious liver or kidney diseases.

This was discovered by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Broad Institute, and Harvard Medical School, who analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 490,416 UK Biobank participants and 414,830 participants in the All of Us Research Program. Their findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

This research is particularly awkward for creationists because of their insistence on the supposedly ‘sacred’ principle that only their intelligent designer can add new information to a genome. If we concede that claim for the sake of argument, then this newly generated genetic information must have been created deliberately and designed to produce a specific outcome — unless creationism’s designer was simply fiddling about aimlessly. Having a specific outcome (as all genes do) is precisely what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute insists is evidence for intelligent design, by a neat process of circular reasoning that only creationists find persuasive.

We then have the additional fact that a high rate of expansion of these DNA sequences is controlled by genetic modifiers and does not occur if any of those genes is not functioning properly. In other words, the resulting liver and kidney diseases are due to what Michael J. Behe famously describes as proof of a designer god: ‘irreducible complexity’.

Still conceding creationist claims, then, Dembski’s and Behe’s own logic demonstrates that their intelligent designer deliberately causes these diseases of old age.

Creationists are further hoist by their own petard in that they traditionally blame disease on ‘The Fall’, thereby conceding that intelligent design creationism is a form of fundamentalist religion rather than science. At the same time, however, they insist that only their intelligent designer can produce the new genetic information responsible for the expansion of these DNA sequences, which neatly rules out the involvement of the vague, non-physical agency they refer to as ‘sin’.

This leaves creationists with an uncomfortable dilemma: either their designer god actively causes liver and kidney disease, or new genetic information can indeed be produced by natural processes in which their designer plays no part — in which case a major plank of creationism collapses. The alternative is to concede that their allegedly omnibenevolent god is directly responsible for serious diseases in elderly people.

It is scarcely worth pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that these outcomes are easily explained as the predictable result of an undirected evolutionary process that has no concept of perfection, inevitably settling for compromise and prioritising reproductive success early in life at the expense of longer-term health and wellbeing.

Unintelligent Design - How An Essential Vitamin Helps Cancer Resist Our Immune Response

Ludwig Cancer Research

Recent research has shown that a metabolite of vitamin A, retinoic acid, can quietly inhibit the immune system, making it less responsive to tumours. It also reduces the effectiveness of a promising anti-cancer immunotherapy.

This work, carried out by scientists at the Princeton University branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has resulted in two papers. The first, published in Nature Immunology, describes how retinoic acid produced by the immune system’s dendritic cells (DCs) alters their behaviour, inducing a dangerous tolerance of tumours. The second, published open access in iScience, outlines progress in developing drugs that inhibit retinoic acid production.

To anyone who understands evolution and how it proceeds through a series of sub-optimal “it’ll do” solutions — constrained by what is available at the time and lacking any foresight — it will come as no surprise that the human body’s dependence on vitamin A comes with a downside. These are the inevitable compromises of evolutionary history. What is inexplicable, however, is this vulnerability in terms of intelligent design by an omniscient, omnipotent designer, who should have foreseen such dangers and engineered a better solution — unless, of course, the creation of favourable conditions for cancer was itself part of the design. And that, of course, leads to the theological problems ID creationism leads inexorably to, but ID advocates routinely ignore - a god who is incompetent, indifferent, powerless, or worse still malevolent.

Unintelligent Design - A Brain 'Designed' for Memory Loss in Old Age

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New Mega-Analysis Reveals Why Memory Declines With Age | Hebrew SeniorLife

A paper published last November in Nature Communications by an international team lead by scientists from the University of Oslo, is just the sort of evidence against intelligent design and for evolution that creationists normally misrepresent, lie about or ignore, because it illustrates the stark difference between what ID creationism predicts and what we see, and of course, what we see is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts. And it's another superb example of how the human body refutes the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible designer, many more of which I have included in my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design.

There is a persistent tendency among creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to imagine biology as if it were the product of a competent, benevolent engineer, optimised for lifelong performance and reliability. Real organisms, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like that. Evolution does not design for comfort, longevity, or even cognitive elegance; it shapes traits that maximise reproductive success in the environments in which our ancestors actually lived. Once reproduction has occurred and offspring are independent, the force of natural selection weakens dramatically. From that point on, biological systems are increasingly free to accumulate compromises, trade-offs, and outright failures — not because they are useful, but because there is little evolutionary incentive to eliminate them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ageing human brain. Memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility are exquisitely tuned for early and mid-life, precisely when they matter most for survival, social navigation, and reproduction. Later in life, however, those same systems reveal a striking lack of long-term maintenance. This is not a mystery, nor is it a design flaw crying out for a supernatural explanation. It is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts under mechanisms such as antagonistic pleiotropy, mutation accumulation, and the diversion of finite biological resources away from indefinite repair and towards reproduction. In short, evolution produces brains that are *good enough* for long enough — not brains that are guaranteed to remain intact into old age.

That expectation is strongly reinforced by the paper in Nature Communications, which combines large-scale neuroimaging and cognitive data to examine why memory reliably declines with age even in otherwise healthy adults. Rather than pointing to a single failing component or a neatly isolated genetic “defect”, the study reveals a diffuse pattern of structural brain change, with memory loss emerging from the cumulative erosion of multiple interconnected regions. This kind of widespread, variable vulnerability is exactly what an evolutionary framework anticipates — and exactly the opposite of what Intelligent Design would lead us to expect. What follows is not evidence of poor design, but evidence of no design at all: only the predictable consequences of evolution’s ruthless focus on reproductive success early in life, and its indifference to what happens long after that job is done.

Malevolent Design - How ID Creationism 'Proves' Pancreatic Cancer is 'Intelligently Designed'

The Krainer lab developed 12 initial ASO drug candidates. The best performing ASO—ASO-A—completely broke the SRSF1-AURKA-MYC circuit, leading to slower tumor growth and cell death.

Untreated PDAC tumor organoid

PDAC tumor organoid after treatment with ASO-A

CSHL’s Krainer lab has discovered a key oncogenic circuit driving aggressive pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression. Using human PDAC tumor organoids, seen here, the team developed a potential RNA splicing-based therapeutic that collapses the circuit.

Short-circuiting pancreatic cancer | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

These examples of what Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski call “irreducible complexity” and “complex specified information” respectively — cited by them as evidence for an intelligent designer — are now being discovered with such monotonous regularity that it is astonishing they never appear in any of the Discovery Institute’s anti-evolution, anti-science propaganda.

The answer to that conundrum is, of course, that such examples are far more frequently found in parasites, pathogens, and idiopathic conditions such as cancer and autoimmune disease. No self-respecting religious fundamentalist is going to open that particular can of worms and appear to be promoting a manifestly malevolent god. It is far safer to remain silent and instead present cult followers with carefully curated examples of supposedly “beneficial” complexity, selected to appeal to their pre-existing biases.

Nevertheless, here is yet another example whose refusal to be addressed by creationists neatly illustrates the disingenuous nature of these alleged “proofs of intelligent design”. The news comes from a paper just published in the Cell Press journal, Molecular Cell, which shows how pancreatic cancer—specifically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)—depends on a complex regulatory circuit consisting of three key components.

The research, conducted by a team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and led by former CSHL graduate student Alexander Kral, builds on earlier work by Professor Adrian Krainer, who discovered that the protein SRSF1 jump-starts PDAC. The new study shows that SRSF1 does not act alone, but forms one of three interdependent “pillars” in this malignant system—the other two being Aurora kinase A (AURKA) and the oncogene MYC. In laboratory experiments, disabling any one of these three components using RNA-based therapy collapsed the circuit, reduced tumour viability, and triggered programmed cell death.

In Michael Behe’s terms, reducing the complexity kills the system. In William Dembski’s terms, destroying the “complex specified genetic information” kills the cancer cells.

This leaves creationists who are honest enough to confront the evidence with a stark choice: either this is evidence that their intelligent designer deliberately designed pancreatic cancer, or Behe’s and Dembski’s long-trumpeted “proofs of intelligent design” are nothing of the sort. Some of the less scientifically literate will, predictably, invoke “The Fall”, thereby revealing once again that Intelligent Design creationism is not science at all. It is merely Bible-literalist religious fundamentalism dressed up in a laboratory coat — exactly what the Discovery Institute has been attempting to smuggle into US classrooms ever since the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard made it clear that teaching creationism in public schools violates the Establishment Clause of the US First Amendment.

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?