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

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

Credit: Vijay Tiwary,
University of Maryland

Wheat monoculture - but it could have been better designed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unintelligent Design - The Needless Complexity That Produces Orchids

Cremastra variabilis

Cremastra variabilis

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life | Kobe University News site

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

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

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

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

Matthew 13: 31–32

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

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

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

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

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

Paired chromosomes showing crossovers in a mouse oocyte.

Hunter lab

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

Hunter lab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump 'fact checking' his autism claim

How evolution explains autism rates in humans | EurekAlert!

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

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

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

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

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

Malevolent Designer News - How Candida Albicans (Thrush) Is Cleverly Designed to Infect Your Mouth - Evolution Or Malevolent Design?

The yeast fungus Candida albicans (blue) breaks out of human immune cells (red) by forming long thread-like cells called hyphae. The part of the hypha that has already left the immune cells is coloured yellow.

© Erik Böhm, Leibniz-HKI

The dose makes the difference - Leibniz-HKI

As has often been pointed out in these blog posts, the "evidence" offered by Discovery Institute fellows William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe for an intelligent designer can, by the same logic and using the same evidence, be interpreted as pointing to a theologically awkward malevolent designer. This is a line of reasoning routinely ignored by the "Cdesign proponentcists", who prefer to overlook the many examples of parasites and pathogens—and the evolutionary traits that make them so successful at invading and surviving within their hosts.

A fresh example that creationists will either have to ignore or blame on "The Fall" comes from researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. They have shown that the fungus Candida albicans, which causes thrush, has evolved a highly sophisticated and "finely tuned" mechanism for infecting the human mouth while evading the immune system.

The stock creationist response is to shift responsibility onto the biblical myth of "The Fall," retreating into Bible literalism. Yet this is precisely the kind of literalism the Discovery Institute has been at pains to insist is not essential to the notion of intelligent design, which it markets as a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory—or "Darwinism," as they prefer to call it. This rhetorical sleight of hand was central to the Institute’s "Wedge Strategy," devised after the 1987 US Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which confirmed that teaching creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The new research reveals that C. albicans produces a toxin called candidalysin in carefully regulated doses that allow it to infiltrate the mucous lining of the mouth. Too little candidalysin, and the fungus would fail to establish itself; too much, and it would trigger an immune response strong enough to destroy it. Normally, C. albicans exists in a round, yeast-like form, but under the "right" conditions it can switch into the filamentous hyphal form typical of fungi. This transformation allows it to penetrate host tissues and, in immune-compromised patients, become life-threatening. It is in this invasive hyphal state that C. albicans produces candidalysin.

The production of hyphae, and therefore candidalysin, is controlled by the gene EED1. By any definition, EED1 would qualify as an example of "complex specified information" according to Dembski’s own formulation — evidence, according to the Discovery Institute, of supernatural intelligent design.

Refuting Creationism - The Lengths Plants Will Go To Just To Get Pollinated - No Intelligence Needed

chloropid flies on a Vincetoxicum nakaianum flower.

The grass fly visiting the flowers (A) and kleptoparasiting spider hunting ant (B)

Press Releases - SCHOOL OF SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

The driving force behind evolution is reproductive success, so in a broad sense every adaptation can be seen as a reproductive strategy. Few, however, are as peculiar as that of Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan. Rather than relying on nectar rewards or visual lures to attract pollinators, this plant enlists the services of kleptoparasitic chloropid flies — insects that usually home in on the scent of injured prey in order to steal a meal.

In a remarkable twist, the flowers of V. nakaianum release chemical signals that closely mimic the odour of ants under attack by predators, especially spiders. Drawn in by what they perceive as the scent of a potential victim to exploit, the flies inadvertently collect and deposit pollen as they move from flower to flower. This unusual strategy has now been documented in detail in a study led by Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo, published in Current Biology, and described in a University of Tokyo School of Science press release.

What makes this particularly striking is how roundabout and intricate the mechanism is. If an intelligent designer had set out to ensure pollination, far simpler methods are available — from bright colours and nectar rewards to direct reliance on wind. Instead, V. nakaianum has evolved a convoluted route, exploiting the specialised behaviour of flies that themselves depend on the predation of ants by spiders. Such elaborate, contingent solutions are precisely what we expect from evolution by natural selection acting over countless generations, not from foresightful design.

Malevolent Design - How Our Gut Microbiome is 'Designed' to Destroy Our Kidneys - Malevolence or Evolution?

Kidney fibrosis linked to molecule made by gut bacteria – News Bureau

Mostly, our gut microbes are beneficial or at least neutral because we have co-evolved and reached an accommodation. One benefit we derive from their presence is that they make life difficult for potentially harmful organisms, if only by monopolising the available resources and occupying the niches in our gut.

There is a downside, of course, as in any evolved system, which is inevitably a compromise and can tip over into pathology under certain circumstances. But overall, because the disadvantages are more than compensated for by the benefits, the system has evolved and been maintained.

However, a newly discovered downside is that a Staphylococcus species may be implicated in one of the serious complications of diabetes mellitus (DM) — kidney fibrosis and ultimately kidney failure. The discovery was made by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Mie University in Japan, co-led by Professor Isaac Cann of Illinois and Professor Esteban Gabazza of Mie University. The bacterium is believed to produce corisin — a small peptide — which is found at high levels in patients with diabetic kidney fibrosis. The researchers have just published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications.

For creationists, this sort of discovery is always a problem, one they normally ignore or blame on “Eve’s sin,” revealing ID creationism for what it is — Bible literalism in a lab coat — which must retreat into mystical theology when faced with problems ID cannot address. Yet creationists also claim that their omniscient creator god is personally responsible for the design of organisms such as Staphylococcus. That would mean it knowingly endowed Staphylococcus with the genes to make corisin, along with all the harmful consequences.

Taking William A. Dembski’s “complex specified genetic information,” which supposedly produces a specific outcome, at face value, the staphylococcal genes are equally “proof” of intelligent design. And so we end up with an unresolved paradox for ID creationism: “complex specified” genes that do us harm, standing as evidence of malevolent design.

Malevolent Design - How The Poxvirus is 'Intelligently Designed' To Rapidly Multiply

A Survival Kit for Smallpox Viruses - Universität Würzburg

The tRNA ensures the cohesion of the polymerase and the associated factors; without it, they would not arrange themselves in this way.

Image: Clemens Grimm.

Researchers at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (JMU) have discovered that poxviruses have developed a unique strategy to multiply rapidly after infecting a host cell. They achieve this by assembling a large protein complex with the help of a transfer RNA (tRNA) molecule. Remarkably, this is the first known example of a ‘chaperone’ function being carried out by a tRNA rather than a protein. Each component of the assembly plays a specific role in the production of new poxviruses. Crucially, the complex only functions when all parts are correctly assembled, and the tRNA is indispensable for this construction.

In other words, the tRNA provides the essential element of the complex, which some might describe—using the Discovery Institute’s own terms—as containing “complex specified information” and forming an “irreducibly complex” system essential to the virus’s success.

By that same logic, it follows that the viruses responsible for smallpox and mpox (monkeypox) must have been intelligently designed. This leaves creationists with an unenviable dilemma:

• Accept the Discovery Institute’s definitions and admit their designer created deadly viruses — theologically awkward.
• Claim another intelligence designs life, beyond their god’s control — even more awkward.
• Abandon the Institute’s “evidence” for intelligent design — politically awkward.

Unintelligent Design - When Snakes Borrow Genes from the Sea - It's Fatal To Creationism

Tiger Snake, Notechis scutatus

Credit: Max Tibby- Snake Catchers Adelaide

A Western Brown snake, Pseudonaja nuchalis

By Andy - originally posted to Flickr as Western Brown, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

New study unlocks mystery origin of iconic Aussie snakes | Newsroom | University of Adelaide

Intrigued by the information I unearthed while researching for my recent blog post about Australia's elapsid snakes and how skinks have evolved resistance to their venom, I discovered that these snakes have evolved from a common ancestor that once lived in the sea, and, while there, picked up a number of 'jumping genes' that are only found in marine animals as diverse as fish, sea squirts, sea urchins, bivalve molluscs and turtles.

The more we learn about genomes, the clearer it becomes that evolution is not a neat or predictable process—it is messy, opportunistic, and deeply influenced by historical contingency. A striking example of this comes from a recent genomic study that traced the origins of Australia’s iconic elapid snakes—not just through their DNA, but through the foreign DNA embedded within it. Researchers have identified at least 14 distinct horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events in these snakes, in which transposable elements—“jumping genes” — from unrelated marine organisms such as fish, tunicates, molluscs, and turtles have been incorporated into the snake genome.

This is compelling evidence that the ancestors of modern Australian elapids passed through a marine environment, acquiring genetic material from the organisms they encountered there. The transfers are not random. They show ecological specificity, temporally sequenced occurrence, and a nested pattern of inheritance — hallmarks of an evolutionary process rather than the actions of an intelligent designer.

For proponents of Intelligent Design creationism, this presents a serious interpretive problem. The idea that different species share features because of a “common designer” does not explain why Australian elapids should contain such a unique suite of genes from marine animals—genes absent in closely related snakes that remained on land. Nor does it account for the fact that many of these sequences serve no obvious function, are neutral or even mildly deleterious, and resemble the genetic detritus typical of unguided evolution.

ID advocates will likely claim this is just more evidence of “design reuse” or “genetic toolkits.” But such claims are not only ad hoc; they fail to explain the clear environmental and phylogenetic patterns observed in the data. The evolutionary explanation, by contrast, is both predictive and parsimonious: snakes dispersed through a marine environment, interacted with marine organisms, and as a result, their genomes bear the signature of that history.
In what follows, we will explore how this discovery not only sheds light on the evolutionary past of Australian elapids, but also exposes the weaknesses in ID’s core explanatory framework. The genome of a snake tells a story—and it's not the story of design.

Malevolent Design - We COULD Have Been Designed To Re-Grow Lost Or Damaged Eyes - Malevolence Or Evolution?

Golden apple snail, Pomacea canaliculata

This Snail’s Eyes Grow Back: Could They Help Humans do the Same? | UC Davis

First, we had the example of Australian lizards which, unlike humans, have been endowed with immunity to snake venom through a simple mutation — the kind of change that creationists like William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute would insist is the result of "intelligent design" because it is both complex and specified.

Now we have the example of the aquatic golden apple snail, Pomacea canaliculata, which — again, unlike humans — can regenerate a lost or damaged eye. The snail’s eye is genetically and structurally similar to the mammalian eye, so there appears to be no reason why an omnibenevolent, omniscient intelligent designer could not have endowed humans and other animals with that ability too. And of course, according to William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe, the irreducibly complex eye and the complex, specified genetic information are both evidence for intelligent design by the same intelligent designer that designed the mammalian eye and it genetic underpinning.

Creationists, of course, believe that humans are the pinnacle of their putative intelligent designer’s work. So, from their viewpoint, the only reasons it didn't grant us the ability to regenerate eyes — or to resist snake venom — must be that it either didn’t want to, didn’t think to, or didn’t know how to. Yet all of those options are inconsistent with the claimed attributes of being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

Which leaves us with only one other explanation: that it wants us to suffer when we damage or lose an eye.

All rather strange, really — especially considering that, according to the Bible, God views blemishes such as blindness as a form of profanity:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken;

No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.

He shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy. Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.

And Moses told it unto Aaron, and to his sons, and unto all the children of Israel.

Leviticus 21:16-24

Almost as an added insult to the humans it denied this regenerative ability to, while giving it to golden apple snails, the golden apple snail is a major invasive agricultural pest which causes widespread damage to rice crops, when it gets into paddy fields.

Malevolent Designer - We COULD Have Been Designed To Resist Snake Venom - Malevolence Or Evolution?

Major Skink, Bellatorias frerei

Major Skink, Bellatorias frerei

How Aussie skinks outsmart lethal snake venom - News - The University of Queensland

As though the recent news from the biological sciences wasn't already bad enough for creationists, we now have two examples demonstrating how—if an omnibenevolent, omniscient deity really had designed humans as the pinnacle of creation—it could have done a far better job. Yet, apparently, it chose not to.

The first, which is the subject of this blog post, involves a seemingly humble Australian lizard, the major skink (Bellatorias frerei), which possesses a simple mutation that renders it immune to Australian snake venom.

The second example, which I’ll cover in my next post, concerns the apple snail. This remarkable mollusc has an eye that is structurally and genetically similar to the mammalian eye—but unlike ours, it can regenerate if damaged or lost. But more on that later.

Australia is infamous for its venomous snakes—many of them deadly. Yet thanks to the widespread availability of antivenoms, there are only one or two fatalities annually, out of hundreds of snakebite cases.

However, if humans had been endowed with the same mutation as the skink, there would be no deaths at all—and no need for antivenoms. Interestingly, this is the same mutation that grants immunity to cobra venom in some mammals, such as mongooses and honey badgers. So, from a creationist perspective, there appears to be no good reason to deprive humans of this mutation — unless the designer was malevolent, indifferent, or just lazy.

It would pose an interesting challenge to intelligent design (ID) creationists to explain the "intelligence" in designing snakes to kill lizards with neurotoxic venom, only to then design lizards that are immune to it. Of course, creationists invariably avoid addressing these sorts of paradoxes—paradoxes which evolutionary biology easily explains as the outcome of an unintelligent evolutionary arms race.

These neurotoxic venoms work by binding to receptors on the surface of muscle cells and blocking the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This prevents muscle contraction, ultimately stopping respiration. The simple mutation in the skinks alters these receptors so that the venom can no longer bind effectively, neutralising its effects.

Creationism Refuted - Complex Specified Information in 'Spanish Flu' Virus Makes ID Creationists Sick

Emergency hospital in Zurich’s Tonhalle during the so-called “Spanish flu” in November 1918

Image: Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, Inventarnummer LM-102737.46

Swiss Genome of the 1918 Influenza Virus Reconstructed | UZH

A major stumbling block that non-biologist Christian fundamentalist theologian William A. Dembski has blundered into is that his so-called ‘proof of intelligent design’ (i.e., the Christian god) also, by the same reasoning, constitutes evidence for malevolent design — something found in virtually every genome of every parasite and pathogen. This presents CDesign proponentsists with a fatal paradox: either their ‘proof of intelligent design’ also proves the existence of an evil designer, or ‘complex specified information’ is not the definitive evidence for design they like to claim it is.

A classic example — and another blow to creationist reasoning—has just been described in a study by researchers from the Swiss universities of Basel and Zurich. They have recovered and analysed the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which killed more people than were killed in the First World War. In fact, the term ‘Spanish flu’ is a misnomer; the virus is now believed to have originated in a U.S. military base in Kansas and was brought to Europe by American soldiers.

The Swiss team discovered that from the outset, the virus appears to have been pre-adapted for infectivity and immune evasion. They identified three key mutations that remained unchanged as the virus evolved over the course of the pandemic. Two of these mutations made the virus resistant to an antiviral component of the human immune system, while the third enabled it to bind more effectively to receptors on the surface of human cells, allowing it to enter and infect them more readily. These mutations were so effective that victims frequently died within hours of the onset of symptoms.

Malevolent Designer - Does The Designer Favour Zebrafish Or Just Hate Humans?

Two zebrafish genes hold the key to regenerating inner ear cells, offering hope for future human therapies.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Regrowing hearing cells: New… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

It's more bad news for Intelligent Design (ID) creationists who believe their putative designer is the anthropophilic, omnibenevolent God of the Bible. Hot on the heels of the discovery that some lemurs do not suffer from the age-related degenerative conditions that cause such misery for humans, comes the news that zebrafish can regenerate lost hair cells—cells that, in humans, enable hearing but cannot be replaced once lost.

These hair cells, located in the human inner ear, detect vibrations and are crucial for hearing. They can be destroyed through prolonged exposure to loud noise, resulting in permanent deafness. However, zebrafish possess homologous cells in their lateral lines—structures that allow them to detect vibrations in water, effectively functioning as a form of hearing. Remarkably, these cells can regenerate under the control of two specific genes.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that, if we accept the intelligent design argument that a divine designer deliberately created these genes, then the same designer could have endowed its supposed special creation—humans—with this regenerative ability too. Within the ID framework, the only possible conclusion is that the designer god chose *not* to give humans this ability, and instead preferred us to go deaf.

The problem for creationists deepens when one considers that these genes exemplify what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute cites as evidence of intelligent design: they are complex and specified, containing the genetic information to produce a defined result. Dembski insists that such "complex specified information" can only originate from an intelligent designer.

Creationists, of course, are compelled to reject the notion that these differences are simply the result of evolutionary processes. But if they also refuse to accept that this zebrafish trait—clearly underpinned by "complex specified genetic information"—constitutes evidence of intelligent design (and therefore points to a deliberate *absence* in humans), they are also undermining Dembski's single defining argument for intelligent design.

This striking discovery was made by researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and has just been published open access in Nature Communications.

Malevolent Design - What A Benevolent Designer Could Have Given Us, But Chose Not To, Apparently.

Coquerel's sifaka,Propithecus coquereli.

Ring-tailed Lemur, Lemur catta.

Study Suggests Lemurs Age Differently Than Humans | Duke Today

According to creationist superstition, humans were specially created by a perfect, anthropophilic, omnibenevolent creator god. If that were true, it would be reasonable to expect humans to be perfectly designed—free from defects or anything likely to cause long-term suffering.

However, the facts do not support this view. For example, as humans age, they increasingly suffer from a condition known as inflammaging — low-grade, chronic inflammation that contributes to a range of health problems, including heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and osteoarthritis.

Properly understood, this should give creationists cause for concern. The same designer god apparently gave some other primates—most notably, certain species of lemur—the ability to avoid this consequence of ageing. In fact, these lemurs even show a reduced tendency toward inflammatory conditions as they grow older.

This raises a serious question for Intelligent Design creationists: if the same designer god was capable of creating such a mechanism for lemurs, why did it not see fit to bestow the same gift upon its supposed favourite creation—humans? Or are these inflammatory conditions intended to cause suffering and disease as we age?

The discovery that some lemurs appear to have been specially favoured by a creator god—if we accept the ID creationist premise for the sake of argument—was made by a team of researchers led by Elaine Elizabeth Gomez Guevara, a biological anthropologist in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, Durham, USA. As a scientist and biologist, however, she attributes the differences between lemurs and humans to evolution — not to indifference or malevolence on the part of a designer god.

The team has just published their findings in the Journal of Comparative Physiology B.

Malevolent Designer News - How Cold Sores Are Cleverly Designed To Maximise Suffering.

The human genome compacted inside cells
eight hours after infection.

Credit: Esther González Almela
and Álvaro Castells García

(Top) Cropped representative STORM-PAINT images of EdC-AF647 labeled hDNA (magenta), immunolabeled H3 (green), and their merge in mock and HSV-1 infected A549 cells. Scale bar: 2 µm. (Bottom) Zoomed-in regions are shown inside yellow boxes. Scale bar: 200 nm.

González-Almela, E., Castells-Garcia, A., Le Dily, F. et al. (2025)

Centre for Genomic Regulation Website

One of the many problems with Intelligent Design (ID) creationism is its complete failure to account for evolutionary arms races.

According to leading ID proponents like William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe, living organisms and their parasites — including viruses — must have been intelligently designed because they are supposedly “irreducibly complex” and exhibit “complex specified information”. But if that were true, it would mean the same designer is deliberately crafting both parasites and the defence mechanisms their hosts use to fend them off — hardly the mark of a supremely intelligent creator.

A further problem, and one that creationists prefer to ignore, is theological: designing pathogens like viruses is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a benevolent creator. In fact, it suggests a malevolent intelligence — one more concerned with maximising suffering than promoting life and maximising happiness. So, when science uncovers yet another example of a virus behaving with surgical precision and apparent ingenuity, ID creationists find themselves in a bind. Is irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information not evidence of intelligent design after all? Or must they admit that the designer is, at best, morally indifferent — or worse, actively malevolent?

The latest headache for the ID camp comes courtesy of the Herpes simplex virus — the one responsible for cold sores. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, with colleagues in Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, Guangdong, China, have discovered that the virus can radically reorganise a host cell’s genetic architecture — and it does so using the host's own cellular machinery. Their findings have just been published open access in Nature Communications.

Unintelligent Designer News - Designed a Cure For COVID-19; Gave It To LLamas - Or Is It Malevolence?

How the single domain antibody locks onto the spike protein’s base

Researchers identify new antibodies against current and future coronaviruses | VIB.BE - Home

Hot on the heels of the news that the putative intelligent designer behind creationism apparently devised a method to prevent the spread of cancer cells through the body—then handed it to the sea cucumber, a group of species not especially prone to cancer—comes another remarkable revelation.

It now appears that this same designer, if we accept the claims of ID creationists, has also developed a highly effective mechanism for disabling the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. And once again, rather than bestowing this gift upon humans, the species most affected by the virus, the designer gave it to llamas — creatures not exactly known for their vulnerability to coronaviruses.

The mechanism in question involves relatively simple molecules known as single-domain antibodies, or VHHs—also referred to as nanobodies. These are much smaller than the conventional antibodies produced by most animals, including humans. They work by binding tightly to the virus’s spike proteins, effectively neutralising it by preventing it from prising open host cells and initiating infection. Even more impressively, these nanobodies appear to be broadly effective against a wide range of SARS-related coronaviruses.

While creationists might marvel at the ingenuity of such a designer, they would be hard-pressed to explain — or more likely, would simply ignore — why this supposedly anthropophilic intelligence chose not to equip humans with such a defence. Instead, it stood idly by as millions suffered and economies collapsed, despite having the ‘cure’ readily available.

This unique llama-specific mechanism was discovered by a team of researchers led by Prof. Xavier Saelens and Dr. Bert Schepens at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie) – University of Ghent (VIB-UGent) Center for Medical Biotechnology.

Malevolent Designer - Creationism's Putative Desiger Designed A Way to Prevent Cancer Spreading - And Gave It To Sea Cucumbers!

A sugar compound found in sea cucumbers could hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer, according to a recent UM-led study published in Glycobiology.

Graphic by Stefanie Goodwiller
University Marketing and Communications

Sea Cucumbers Could Hold Key to Stopping Cancer Spread | Ole Miss

Imagine you're a designer, and you've created a species — humans — for whom you have a particular fondness. Only, something keeps going dreadfully wrong with your blueprint. A large number of them keep dying because their cells become cancerous when they fail to replicate properly, and these cancers then spread to other organs, which ultimately give up the ghost.

Now, you can’t quite work out why these cancers start. For some reason, you've included substances called glycans on the surfaces of cells, and — just to complicate things — you’ve made cancer cells produce an enzyme called Sulf-2, which alters these glycans to help the cancer spread. Your solution? A stroke of genius: create another enzyme that inhibits Sulf-2. And lo! It works.

So, who do you give this life-saving enzyme to?

If you're creationism’s supposedly super-intelligent designer, you don’t give it to your favourite species — the one made in your own image, no less. No, instead you bestow this miracle molecule upon… sea cucumbers. A species that, incidentally, doesn’t even have a problem with cancer.

This, if they actually understood the subject properly, is what Intelligent Design creationists consider compelling evidence of a supremely intelligent designer.

The discovery that sea cucumbers possess this enzyme was made by researchers at the University of Mississippi and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Their findings are published in the journal Glycobiology and can be read here.

It’s also neatly summarised in a University of Mississippi news article:

Malevolent Design - The Sneaky Way TB Keeps On Making Us Sick

Credit: Md Ariful Islam

Study discovers DNA switch that controls TB growth – and could help unlock its antibiotic resistance secrets | University of Surrey

If you're an omniscient, omnipotent, malevolent designer of parasites — such as the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in humans — then you're hardly going to let a little thing like the immune system (which you supposedly also designed to protect them) or even the development of medical science and antibiotics spoil your fun in causing random suffering, are you? Naturally, you'd equip your creation with mechanisms to overcome these obstacles.

Within the framework of Intelligent Design creationism, that's precisely what this recent discovery should look like — at least to those creationists who don't simply ignore the obvious and pretend it isn't there. Scientists from the Universities of Surrey and Oxford have discovered that Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses a reversible process known as ADP-ribosylation to modify its DNA, controlling both replication and gene expression. This allows the bacterium to remain dormant for extended periods and reactivate when environmental threats, such as immune responses or antibiotics, have passed.

This presents a problem for creationists who insist on believing in a benevolent creator deity and simultaneously hold that features such as irreducible complexity and complex specified information are sure signs of intelligent design—claims promoted by Discovery Institute fellows Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski. Since Mycobacterium tuberculosis displays these very characteristics, so either it was designed specifically to cause suffering, or those characteristics are not the reliable indicators of divine design that Behe and Dembski claim, and their entire argument collapses.

This discovery was recently published open access in The EMBO Journal, and further details are available in the University of Surrey press release:

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Helping Cholera Win An Arms Race Against A Virus

How cholera bacteria outsmart viruses - EPFL

Time-course microscopy snapshots comparing cell morphology and cellular DNA content, as monitored using HU–mNeonGreen fusion (mNG), in WT and ΔWASA-1 backgrounds, following infection with ICP1-2006 at MOI 5.

Adams, D.W., Jaskólska, M., Lemopoulos, A. et al. (2025).

Biological arms races represent one of those problematic areas in biology that Intelligent Design (ID) creationists tend to avoid — precisely because they undermine the notion of a single, supreme intelligence orchestrating the design of all living organisms. These arms races typically occur in predator–prey or parasite–host relationships, where the survival of one party depends on improving its ability to evade, resist, or defend against the other — while the other evolves countermeasures to overcome those defences. From the standpoint of a single, omniscient designer, this results in a paradox: today’s ‘solution’ to a problem becomes tomorrow’s new problem to be solved. Where, exactly, is the intelligence in that?

A striking example of such an evolutionary arms race has just been uncovered by a team from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who found that a notorious strain of cholera possesses a suite of sophisticated immune systems to fend off viral attack. According to ID proponents like William A. Dembski, both this cholera strain and the viruses that infect it should qualify as products of ‘complex, specified information’. Likewise, under Michael J. Behe’s definition, both would be considered ‘irreducibly complex’. By their logic, this makes them the result of intelligent design by a supernatural creator.

In other words, creationism’s designer god has supposedly created viruses that infect the cholera bacterium—then equipped the bacterium with complex machinery to defend itself.

To make matters worse for creationists, this virus-resistant cholera strain was behind a devastating epidemic across Latin America. That is, the designer god not only enabled the bacterium to resist viruses, but in doing so gave it a better chance of surviving to infect and harm humans—using its ‘intelligently designed’, ‘irreducibly complex’ viral defences.

The research is published open access in Nature Microbiology.