Unintelligent Design - Another Failure By Creationism's Blundering Designer

Machine for repairing broken mtDNA.

AI-Generated image
(with apologies to William Heath Robinson)

The graphic shows images of a cell under mtDNA replication stress made using so-called Correlative Light and Electron Microscopy (for short: CLEM). The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA, green) is ejected from the mitochondria (magenta) and taken up by a lysosome, which contains the retromer (cyan). The highlighted section was also analysed using 3D-CLEM to obtain volumetric information.

Fig.: HHU/David Pla-Martín.

Medicine: Publication in Science Advances

Yet Another Workaround for a Flawed Design.

Researchers led by Professor Dr David Pla-Martín of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, alongside colleagues from the University of Cologne, have uncovered yet another complex but error-prone workaround—this time, to fix a problem that stems from an earlier design flaw.

They have identified a mechanism used to repair mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) when it breaks. From an intelligent design perspective, mitochondria — once free-living bacteria—were supposedly the 'quick fix' to give eukaryotic cells the ability to efficiently convert glucose into adenosine triphosphate (ATP) using oxygen. ATP is the primary energy currency used in metabolic reactions, formed from adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and phosphate.

A truly intelligent designer, however, could have simply endowed cells with this biochemical machinery from the start—no need to incorporate foreign bacteria complete with their own DNA. But apparently, that would have been too simple.

This convoluted solution, predictably, comes with problems. Mitochondria often replicate their DNA imperfectly, or the DNA becomes damaged, leading to mitochondrial failure and a range of diseases. So, yet another layer of biological complexity has evolved to patch up the broken mtDNA. And, in classic Heath Robinson fashion, this repair mechanism is itself error-prone.

Unintelligent Design - Why Humans Are Not Intelligently Designed for Modern life

"Now look what you've done! The place is not fit to live in anymore!"

Humanity's Real Problem: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch | Psychology Today

A sure sign of unintelligent design is one that completely fails to anticipate the future. Biologically speaking, poor design occurs when an organism is adapted to an environment at a specific moment but becomes increasingly maladapted as the environment evolves. This happens either because the organism fails to adapt quickly enough or because it was never designed with future changes in mind in the first place.

A good, intelligent designer, especially one equipped with the power of foresight, would not just design for today but for tomorrow, next year and for the foreseeable future. Failure to do so is incompetence, indolence or sheer malevolence in putting its design on course for ultimate disaster.

In my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Creationism, I highlight numerous examples where the human body evolved for past environments — previous diets, predators, and social pressures — leaving us today with various vulnerabilities and compromises.

Human evolution moves at a glacial pace, barely noticeable even over many generations, while our environment has dramatically transformed within just a few decades.

Consider the technology available to our parents and grandparents compared to what we now take for granted—steam trains, landline telephones, no internet or colour TV, no central heating or air conditioning beyond an open fire or window, no satellite navigation, and no instant global communication. Further back, major societal shifts arose from mechanised farming, factory work, innovations in textile manufacturing, and even improvements in wheat milling for bread. Later still came automobiles and mass transit.

Yet, genetically speaking, our recent ancestors who navigated these revolutionary changes remain nearly identical to us today.

Now, we stand on the threshold of another seismic shift: artificial intelligence. Just a decade ago, writing this introduction would have involved considerable time researching, fact-checking, and carefully drafting paragraphs that still might not have fully conveyed my intended message. Today, I can draft my thoughts, then leverage the vast processing power of AI (like ChatGPT-4.5) to refine and clarify my ideas effortlessly. These introductory paragraphs are precisely the outcome of such a collaboration.

The core issue, however, remains that human culture is evolving at a rate several orders of magnitude faster than our biological capacity to adapt, creating an ever-widening gap between how we need to respond to new challenges and how we're inherently equipped to do so.

The consequences of this accelerating mismatch are thoughtfully explored in an article by Mike Brooks, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, Humanity's Real Problem: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch.

Unintelligent Design - How The Badly-Designed Immune System Destroys Lungs

Scientists Discover Immune Cell Networks Driving Deadly Lung Disease | Rutgers University

Autoimmune conditions and allergies provide strong evidence for evolution over intelligent design by highlighting the imperfections and trade-offs inherent in the immune system. These disorders demonstrate how a system shaped by natural selection can prioritize short-term survival at the expense of long-term health, leading to vulnerabilities that are difficult to reconcile with the concept of a perfect designer.

Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues. Examples include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes.

The immune system must strike a delicate balance: it must be reactive enough to fight infections but tolerant enough to avoid attacking the body’s own cells. Evolution has shaped this balance, but it is imperfect. A hyperactive immune system, while better at combating infections, increases the risk of autoimmune diseases.

The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design pp. 129-130

Now it's beginning to look like we must include the fatal lung disease known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) to the long list of autoimmune conditions that stem directly from the facts that the immune system evolved and was not intelligently designed.

The very existence of the immune system should prompt creationists to reconsider several basic beliefs and especially claims made by leading proponents, such as Michael J. Behe. Behe suggests that pathogens and the diseases they cause result from 'genetic entropy', a degradation enabled by biblical 'Sin', which supposedly causes genomes to 'devolve', thus creating parasites and pathogens. Other creationists suggest an alternative viewpoint, attributing the existence of parasites and diseases to an evil designer, such as Satan - a claim which is regarded as blasphemous by fundamentalists for whom it is doctrine that there is only one creative entity - God.

In contrast, William A. Dembski argues that any 'complex specified information' (CSI) within the genome must originate from an intelligent designer, typically inferred — though seldom explicitly acknowledged by prominent creationists — as the God described in the Bible or the Qur'an. The genes that enable parasites to evade our immune defences are clear examples of what Dembski would term CSI, whereas Behe regards these genes as 'devolved' from an initially perfect creation.

However, neither Behe nor Dembski adequately addresses the question of who or what designed the immune system itself. Was it the same designer responsible for Dembski's complex specified information, or was it Behe's designer of an initial, perfect creation? If we consider Dembski's argument, it raises a critical question: where is the intelligence in designing an immune system to protect organisms against pathogens created by the very same designer? Regarding Behe's perspective, if the immune system were part of the initial perfect design, why would the designer anticipate 'The Fall' and its consequences unless it was intentionally planned? Alternatively, did all organisms possessing immune defences receive an upgrade after 'The Fall', indicating a supposedly omniscient deity initially failed to foresee the need for such protection? This then raises the question, is the designer either not omniscient or not competent, or did it plan for the 'Fall' and the suffering caused by parasites all along?

Not only are there these gaping flaws in creationism's attempts to account for the immune system within their own theology, including its failure to protect us and its propensity to attack us because the delicate balance referred to above is not robust enough or sensitive enough. The fact is that a perfectly designed immune system should make much of medical science redundant. However, the evidence continues to accumulate that the immune system, like the rest of biology is not the result of intelligent design but of an evolutionary process with all its inherent faults, constraints and inevitable suboptimal compromises.

Evidence strongly supporting the theory that IPF is the result of an autoimmune response by an over-sensitive immune system has been provided by a team of researchers led by Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Their findings are being published in the European Respiratory Journal and are described in Rutgers Today:

Refuting Creationism - Students Discover How The Mammalian Immune System Evolved.

Nebraska undergrads uncover ancient secrets of human immunity | Nebraska Today

(C–F) Expanded views of the interaction interface between STAT2 CCD and IRF9 IAD for mouse (C), human (D), Hypanus sabinus (E), and Stegostoma tigrinum (F). The interactions are observed in the crystal structure of the mouse STAT2-IRF9 complex (PDB ID: 5OEN) [19.1]. For humans and the two cartilaginous fishes, the interactions are based on the modeled structures of the STAT2-IRF9 complex. The key residues involved in the interface are labeled. The phenylalanine (F) on the STAT2 protein is colored in green. The four residues forming the cleft on the IRF9 protein are colored in magenta. The corresponding sequences of the interface area and other details are found in Supporting Information S1: Figure S3.

Recent research conducted by undergraduate students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has provided compelling insights into the evolutionary development of the human immune system. Under the guidance of Professor Luwen Zhang, students Vanessa Hubing, Avery Marquis, and Chanasei Ziemann co-authored two significant studies published in the Journal of Medical Virology. Their work elucidates the progression of immune regulatory mechanisms in vertebrates, highlighting the transition to more complex systems with the evolution of jaws. Additionally, they explored how a pseudogene, potentially introduced into primate DNA via a retrovirus approximately 60 million years ago, may have enhanced ancestral immune responses.

These findings offer robust evidence supporting the theory of evolution by demonstrating the gradual and adaptive changes in genetic material that have led to sophisticated immune functions in humans. The identification of a pseudogene's integration into primate DNA and its subsequent role in immunity exemplifies natural selection's influence on genetic composition over millions of years. Such evidence challenges creationist perspectives by providing concrete examples of evolutionary processes shaping complex biological systems, underscoring the dynamic nature of genetic evolution in response to environmental pressures.

During the course of evolution, these factors have evolved as additional layers of complexity to improve and refine a system which, as the product of an unplanned, utilitarian evolutionary process was a suboptimal compromise between the tendencies to over-react to some infections and fail to respond to others. An intelligently-designed sytem would need no such regulatory mechanisms. This is how we can tell that such overly-complex systems were not intelligently designed.

Malevolent Designer News - How C. difficile is Designed to Kill Off Competition in Our Gut

C. diff uses toxic compound to fuel growth advantage VUMC News

Like all organisms, and particularly pathogenic parasites that colonise our intestines, Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) must compete with other organisms for nutrients. This competition inevitably fuels evolutionary arms races.

For devotees of creationism’s ‘intelligent designer’, C. diff might appear to be a cunning response to medical science's successful use of antibiotics against bacterial pathogens. This is because C. diff is equipped with multiple antibiotic-resistance genes, allowing it to thrive in hospital environments. It often infects patients who are already vulnerable due to other health conditions or compromised immunity, making it a significant medical challenge.

Furthermore, if one follows William A. Dembski's reasoning, the ‘complex specified information’ in C. diff’s genome, which grants it a competitive edge, must logically be attributed to an intelligent designer. Michael J. Behe’s attempt to absolve his version of an intelligent designer by blaming ‘sin’, ‘genetic entropy’, or alleged ‘devolution’ fails here. A mutation that clearly provides an adaptive advantage cannot logically be termed a ‘devolution’ from a supposedly more ‘perfect’ ancestral state.

If creationism’s intelligent designer intended to kick people when they were down, it could hardly have done better than designing C. diff.

How C. diff competes for resource in our gut by waging chemical warfare against the other gut biota is the subject of a paper in the journal Cell Host & Microbe by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). Their findings are described in VUMC News:

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

William Heath Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Bird Feathers From Dinosaur Ancestors

From dinosaurs to birds: the origins of feather formation - Medias - UNIGE

Feathers provide a fascinating example of how evolution can repurpose structures over time. Initially evolving in response to one set of selective pressures, feathers later opened the door for entirely new functions unrelated to their original purpose.

Early feathers appeared among dinosaurs primarily as an adaptation for thermoregulation. Simple, filamentous feathers offered significantly better insulation than traditional reptilian scales, helping dinosaurs maintain stable body temperatures. Among bipedal theropod dinosaurs, these insulating feathers eventually evolved into more complex structures, freeing forelimbs to develop into wings. Feathers subsequently became specialized for powered flight, having first likely served intermediate functions such as display or gliding.

The presence of insulating feathers likely provided a survival advantage during the dramatic climate changes following the asteroid impact that marked the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago, contributing to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.

This is why we see a clear progression through the fossil record, unlike what would be expected of an intelligent design process, where birds, complete with flight feathers, would be expected to make a sudden appearance without ancestry.

Today, feathers in modern birds retain their important role in thermoregulation while also facilitating flight and serving as display structures. Vibrant and diverse plumage has evolved under sexual selection pressures, playing a crucial role in mating rituals, mate choice, and reinforcing genetic isolation among closely related species, thereby preventing hybridization.

Unintelligent Design - How 'Selfish' Genes Can Act Like Killer Parasites

Fluorescent microscopy images of highly variable wtf genes’ poison proteins (Wtf^poison) exhibit similar aggregation and distribution within yeast cells.

Graphical illustration showing rules for effective and ineffective neutralization of poison proteins. Yeast cells are “rescued” when wtf^poison and wft^antidote specifically co-assemble and localize toward the vacuole (left panel). Otherwise, yeast cells are destroyed (right panels).

Stowers scientists uncover… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

As Richard Dawkins explained in his influential book, The Selfish Gene, all genes can be thought of as "selfish" in the sense that natural selection favours those most effective at surviving and replicating. Such genes persist over generations at the expense of rival alleles. Even when genes form cooperative alliances, as they commonly do, it ultimately serves their own evolutionary success. Of course, genes are merely chemical entities - mindless, emotionless, and incapable of intention or planning - so the concept of "selfishness" is simply a metaphor designed to illustrate gene-cantered evolution.

However, within the genomes of many multicellular organisms, certain genes can more literally be described as selfish. These genes act parasitically, exploiting the host cell’s replication machinery solely to propagate themselves, despite having no beneficial function and often harming their host by reducing its fertility. The mechanisms behind this parasitic behaviour have puzzled scientists since these genes were first discovered.

Malevolent Designer News - How Tuberculosis Is Protected During Airborne Transmission

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet

Scientists have discovered a family of genes that becomes essential for survival specifically when the tuberculosis pathogen is exposed to the air, likely protecting the bacterium during its flight.

Image: iStock; MIT News.

Study: Tuberculosis relies on protective genes during airborne transmission | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Imagine you're the designer of a nasty little pathogen that is designed to make people sick and die, but you have a problem. The organism needs to get from one victim to the next in order to spread and make as many people sick as possible, but, as an obligate pathogen, it is designed to life in the moist warm interior of its victims, so is not very good at living outside, where it needs to be, if only briefly, to get into its next victim.

Quite a problem, eh?

But not something beyond creationism's divine malevolence, it seems, because, if you accept creationists' argument for the moment, the parasitic organism that causes tuberculosis is specially designed to survive while in transit, so to speak.

Exactly how it does it has recently been discovered by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their collaborators. The key to its survival is a family of genes that were previously believed to be non-essential because they had no effect when injected into a potential host but have now been shown to be essential for survival outside a host's body.

Incompetent Design - Failing To Plan Is Planning to Fail - And A Fatal Cancer Is The Result

Stress

Chronic stress and obesity work together to accelerate pancreatic cancer development and growth, study finds | UCLA Health

It’s a fundamental principle of management that failing to plan is, in effect, planning to fail. The future is inevitable, so preparation for it is essential.

Creationism’s supposed designer, however, is claimed to be both omniscient and omnipotent — fully aware of the future and capable of shaping it. In fact, many fundamentalist believers assert that this designer has a specific plan for each individual, meaning it doesn’t just foresee the future but actively creates it.

Logically, then, an intelligent, all-knowing creator should have planned accordingly, yet the evidence suggests otherwise. Our bodies are poorly adapted to endure the demands of modern urban life in a technologically advanced society, indicating a lack of foresight in their design.

The alternative explanation? This designer was fully aware of our future needs but deliberately created a body ill-suited for them.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted A Solutions For It's Own Incompetence, To Ensure Cancers Survive

The Pol-θ enzyme (blue) joins two parts of a broken DNA strand (yellow).
This process is mutagenic and can give rise to cancer.

Credit: Scripps Research

How a crucial DNA repair protein works—and what it means for cancer treatment | Scripps Research

According to creationist mythology, once upon a time a magic creator created animal life complete with DNA which needs to be replicated every time a cell divides for growth and/or repair.

Unfortunately, the process it designed to make this happen wasn't very well designed, so the resulting DNA is often broken or faulty. DNA can be broken in a number of ways, all of which could have been avoided by a more robust design, which should have been within the capabilities of an omniscient deity, capable of creating living organisms ex nihilo:

DNA double-strand breaks can occur in multiple phases of the cell cycle, not just mitosis. While replication stress is a major endogenous source, environmental factors like radiation, chemicals, and viruses can also introduce DSBs. Cells rely on homologous recombination (HR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and alternative end joining (alt-EJ) to repair these breaks, though error-prone pathways like Pol θ-mediated repair contribute to mutagenesis.

Then, in a method typical of creationism's incompetent designer, which in every respect resembles a mindless utilitarian natural process, proceeding without a plan and settling for suboptimal solutions, it added yet another layer of complexity as a work-around for its failure, and designed the enzyme, polymerase θ (Pol-θ), which searches the DNA looking for faults. Unfortunately, due to suboptimal design, this too fails and produces cancers.

Unintelligent Design - Flightless Birds Still Have Feathers for Flight

The extinct "elephant bird" of Madagascar.

Photo: Brian Choo

When birds lose the ability to fly, their bodies change faster than their feathers - Field Museum

As though designing birds with wings that they can't fly with wasn't stupid enough, it seems creationism's idiot designer designed them with flight feathers too. That is, if you believe the childish nonsense of special creation of species without ancestors, which is a central superstition of the creationist cult. And presumably, because it's also central to the cult that species don't evolve, it must be assumed that every extinct species was created without ancestors too, so they can't have evolved from ancestors either.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that a study has shown that as flightless birds became flightless over time, they tended to retain feathers that were characteristic of flying birds, and in particular, those of their flying relatives.

In other words, as flightlessness evolved, the last thing to change were their feathers.

Which begs thew question why creationism’s putative designer gave flightless birds feathers that looked as though they had been inherited from flying ancestors.

Of course, there is a rational explanation for this, and it doesn't involve magic creation by a blundering idiot behaving like a mindless process operating without a plan.

Unintelligent Design - A Bird-Brained Designer?

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

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

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

Not so creationism's intelligent designer.

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

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

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

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

© K. Wild, K. Soni, I. Sinning.

Spliceosome: How Cells Avoid Errors When Manufacturing mRNA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unintelligent Design - An Arms Betwen The Sexes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Californian two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides

Californian two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides

Octopuses have some of the oldest known sex chromosomes | OregonNews

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

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

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

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

Muscles of the head

AI-generated image (with AI spelling)

Muscles of the ear

Image by BioDigital, edited by Lecturio

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

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

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

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

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

Giant clams have colourful mantles.

Ruiqi Li/CU Boulder

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Book - The Intelligent Design Advocate's Handbook

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbourofelis in its native Miocene habitat

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4o)

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

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

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

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

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

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