Unintelligent Design - How a Cell Division Error Sometimes Causes Cancers - Incompetence or Malevolence?

Chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta).

Credit: Carlos Sacristan Lopez.
© Hubrecht Institute.

Two microscopy images of chromosomes. The left image shows chromosomes during mitosis (white). In orange, a centromere is visible consisting of two subdomains (arrows), each bound to a discrete bundle of microtubules (magenta). The right image depicts a dividing cancer cell showing a missegregating chromosome in the middle. The two centromere subdomains (arrows) of this chromosome appear split.

Credit: Carlos Sacristan Lopez. Copyright: Hubrecht Institute.

Research on centromere structure yields new insights.

Creationists, who, generally speaking, know little or nothing of biology and don't want to either because the risk of wondering it they could be wrong is far too great, are easily fooled by the frauds with a vested interest in keeping them simultaneously ignorant and imagining they have a deeper understanding than the millions of educated, working biomedical scientists who apply the Theory of Evolution every day of their working lives.

One thing they've been fooled into believing is that there is some sort of perfection in design inside a cell and that same designer is responsible for everything about living organisms.

But, in the last few years, under the onslaught of science, the frauds have needed to fall back from the demonstrably false notion of perfection of design in view if cancers, diseases and parasites, and now blame something for these obvious imperfections, which, by definition, could not be the products of a perfect designer god, do they have invented the biologically nonsensical notion of 'genetic entropy' and devolution caused by 'Sin' over which their omnipotent, omnibenevolent designer god is powerless.

And, again under the onslaught of science, the frauds have also conceded that evolution does indeed happen and happened at a massively accelerated rate to account for all the biodiversity produced by a small number of survivors of a genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago.

Unintelligent Designer News - How Creationism's Idiot Designer Continually Designs Different Solutions To The Same Problem

Squinting bush brown, Bicyclus anynana

Squinting bush brown, Bicyclus anynana

© Judy Gallagher (CC BY-SA)

New sex-determining mechanism in African butterfly discovered - News - University of Liverpool

Once sexual reproduction had become established in multicellular organisms, there was selection pressure to determine the gender of a developing embryo, so the result was either genetically male or genetically female. In humans and other mammals, for example, this is achieved by the XY Chromosomes, which, unlike all the other chromosomes (autosomes) are not paired. A zygote with 2X (homozygous) becomes a female and a zygote with XY (heterozygous) becomes male. Because the zygote gets either one or the other of these chromosomes from each parent these are the only combinations possible, so we never see a YY zygote.

Malevolent Design - Combatting The Highly Toxic, Tissue Destroying Spitting Cobra Venom

African black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

Warren Klein via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Black-necked spitting cobra, Naja nigricollis

© Marius Burger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

First effective treatment found for spitting cobra snakebite - Lancaster University

Snake venom is usually a potent cocktail of multiple different toxins, 'designed' to kill, mostly small vertebrate prey very quickly, so the snake can strike, then wait for the prey to become paralyzed or die before it can go very far.

The reason for this rich cocktail is an interesting piece of evolutionary biology that would embarrass any creationist with the courage to learn about it. It is the result of repeated arms races between the snake and its prey species. Not only that, but it involves new genetic information arising, by gene duplication and mutations - contrary to creationist dogma that such a thing is impossible.

As one prey species starts to evolve resistance there is selection pressure on the snake to change its venom to overcome the resistance or loose one source of food, but, there must be a balance between retaining one food species but loosing several others if the changed venom is less effective against them. Resistance usually arises when there is a change in receptor sites on cell surfaces, on which the venom acts so the active venom molecule doesn't bind to it.

Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted Red Squirrels To Spread Leprosy in Medieval England

Lepers having magic spells cast over them

Mycobacterium leprae

Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host: Current Biology

Few places in Europe or elsewhere were more pious than Medieval England, but still creationism's pestilential malevolence continued to make people suffer with diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and the related leprosy. Even the extreme measures taken by believers to atone for imaginary transgressions that had brought about the Black Death had failed to assuage the putative designer god who was believed to be visiting this pestilence upon people.

The superstitious Bible-based belief in evil spirits and 'sin' as the cause of disease led to the social stigma that made the disease so feared and led to the isolation of sufferers in lepper colonies, and often reduced to begging to stay alive. Poor nutrition and poor sanitation led to a worsening of the condition and, although these counter-measures were visibly ineffective, such was the belief in the Bible that it was inconceivable that the disease could be caused by anything other than 'sin' and evil demons being permitted to enter the victim.

The modern equivalent of this victim-blaming superstition can be found in the modern creationist tactic of blaming 'Sin' and 'genetic entropy' for parasites, with demons being replaced by 'entropy' to make it sound sciencey. It is of course, Bible-based superstition without supporting evidence.

And now, if you believe that stuff, there is evidence that creationism's putative designer god designed M. leprae to also infect red squirrels so they would act as a repository to spread leprosy. Red squirrels were common in those days and were often captured in the wild for pets or pelts. Their skins, when used for clothing, would have carried M. leprae and infected anyone who wore them - a brilliant strategy, if you hate people and want them to be sick, suffer and die.

Unintelligent Design News - How Creationism's Putative Designer 'Brilliantly' Designs Solutions To Problems It Supidly Designed

Two-spot spider mite, Tetranychus urticae

Two-spot spider mite (yellow form), Tetranychus urticae

Plants utilise drought stress hormone to block snacking spider mites | Sainsbury Laboratory

To start at the beginning because that's always a good place to start, plants need to get water and nutrients up to their leaves, so their 'designer' gave them a vascular system but without a pump, so, to maintain the upward flow, they need to evaporate away (or transpire) the water that just arrived in their leaves. They do this through tiny pores (or stomata; singular=stoma) that are just about visible to the naked eye, and clearly visible under a hand lens or a microscope.

These stomata are guarded by guard cells, one on either side, which can swell to close the stoma or shrink to allow the stoma to open, as the need arises.

However, these stomata are an open invitation to sap-sucking arthropods such as mites and aphids, which are cleverly designed, reputedly by the same designer that designed the stomata, which can push their mouthparts into the stoma to get at the nutrient-rich watery contents of the leaf.

So, having designed these sap-suckers to exploit the transport system it designed for plants, creationism's putative designer clearly saw the sap-suckers it had designed as a problem to be solved.

How it added this Heath-Robinson layer of additional complexity to solve the problem the earlier layer of complexity had caused is the subject of a research paper by a collaboration of researchers from the Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP), Spain, and Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (SLCU), Cambridge, UK and a news release from Cambridge University:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pathogen Is Designed to Cause UTIs

Escherichia coli,
The usual cause of urinary tract infection (UTI)

UTI's will affect 50% of women at some time in their lives

How E. coli get the power to cause urinary tract infections | Michigan Medicine

Despite their protestations that their god doesn't create pathogens - some other creative entity does that, apparently - they have been in love with Escherichia coli, or E. coli ever since their guru and Deception Insitute flunky, Michael J Behe, persuaded them that he had 'proved' their god exists and designs things because he couldn't work out how the E. coli flagellum could have evolved - so God did it!

There problem then, courtesy of Michael J Behe is that they have accepted that, if there was a designer involved in E. coli's design, it is the god that Michael J Behe 'proved' designed it, so their god designs pathogens, and even designs clever way to make them good at making us sick.

With that in mind, which creationist is going to argue against Michael J Behe's clever 'proof' that their god designs things so must exist, and insist that it isn't also behind the newly discovered way it manages to cause urinary tract infections (UTIs)?

The discovery that they can live, reproduce, and do their nasty thing in the otherwise near-sterile urinary tract, was made by researchers at the laboratory of Professor Harry Mobley in the University of Michigan Medical School.

Having been filtered by the kidneys, while urine contains some chemicals such as metabolites, it is about as sterile as it gets, with anything in it entering through the urethral meatus, in women, stupidly placed near the anus and inside the vulva where it can become infected during sexual intercourse by a penis cleverly designed with a foreskin to harbour pathogens under.

It has now been discovered that E. coli is also cleverly 'designed' to grab the nutrients it needs but can't manufacture itself by have a highly efficient transport system for taking them from its victims at a rate of thousands of molecules a second. One of the genes responsible for this, codes for an enzyme known as ATP-binding cassette (ABC).

Typical of creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer, if you believe in such a thing, is the Heath-Robinson workaround for the lack of genes for manufacturing these amino acids, where the parasite needs an energy-intensive ATP-based transport system, complete with multi-layered back-up systems to keep them working - the needless waste and needless complexity, so typical of evolved systems and the antithesis of intelligently designed systems. The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal PNAS and explained them in a University of Michigan news release:

Antivaxxer Idiot News - How An mRNA Vaccine Is Proving Effective Against A Highly Malignant Brain Cancer

Sadeem Qdaisat, Dr. Hector Mendez-Gomez and Dr. Elias Sayour
discuss their new study.

Photo by Nate Guidry

Dr. Elias Sayour, Chong Zhao and Arnav Barpujari discuss the mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida

New mRNA cancer vaccine triggers fierce immune response to fight malignant brain tumor - UF Health

Contrary to the bizarre antivaxxer claims that the mRNA vaccines used against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 somehow causes cancer, based on nothing more substantial than the fact that some people who developed cancer had previously been vaccinated, there is now an mRNA vaccine that is proving spectacularly effective against a highly malignant form of brain cancer.

Curiously, the fact that some people who developed cancer will previously have sung Christmas carols or eaten potatoes, is never given as a probable cause, but then few people who believe antivaxxer disinformation will understand statistics or statistical correlations.

The mRNA vaccine against the brain cancer known as Glioblastoma has shown very promising results in a small-scale study of four adults by scientists at Florida University, repeating the results of a trial in 10 dogs and preclinical trials in mice.

The vaccine successfully, and very quickly, reprograms the immune system to produce highly specific antibodies against the tumour. Intelligent design proponents (or 'cdesign proponentcists' as they have been known since the Kitzmiller trial) might like to explain why the immune system, supposedly intelligently designed to protect us, needs to be artificially reprogrammed by human medical science.

The trick has been to create clusters of nanoparticles of lipid-enclosed mRNA wrapped around one another like a miniature onion. These means the mRNA will be released slowly and reprogram the immune system more effectively than a single burst would. The specific mRNA is tailor-made for the patient's tumour and creates antibodies against specific tumor proteins, in the same way the mRNA anti-COVID vaccines target the virus's spike proteins, so is specific to that particular cancer.

The results are reported in the journal Cell and are also explained in a University of Florida Health News release:

In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The results mirror those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from naturally occurring brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation, as they had no other treatment options, as well as results from preclinical mouse models. The breakthrough now will be tested in a Phase 1 pediatric clinical trial for brain cancer.

Reported May 1 in the journal Cell, the discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

“Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions,” said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to “educate” the immune system that a tumor is foreign. “And the reason we’ve done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.”

Among the most impressive findings was how quickly the new method, delivered intravenously, spurred a vigorous immune-system response to reject the tumor, said Sayour, principal investigator of the RNA Engineering Laboratory within UF’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and a UF Health Cancer Center and McKnight Brain Institute investigator who led the multi-institution research team.

“In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’ — immune cold, very few immune cells, very silenced immune response — to ‘hot,’ very active immune response,” he said. “That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response.”

Glioblastoma is among the most devastating diagnoses, with median survival around 15 months. Current standard of care involves surgery, radiation and some combination of chemotherapy.

The new publication is the culmination of promising translational results over seven years of studies, starting in preclinical mouse models and then in a clinical trial of 10 pet dogs that had spontaneously developed terminal brain cancer and had no other treatment options. That trial was conducted with owners’ consent in collaboration with the UF College of Veterinary Medicine. Dogs offer a naturally occurring model for malignant glioma because they are the only other species that develops spontaneous brain tumors with some frequency, said Sheila Carrera-Justiz, D.V.M., a veterinary neurologist at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine who is partnering with Sayour on the clinical trials. Gliomas in dogs are universally terminal, she said.

After treating pet dogs that had spontaneously developed brain cancer with personalized mRNA vaccines, Sayour’s team advanced the research to a small Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trial designed to ensure safety and test feasibility before expanding to a larger trial.

In a cohort of four patients, genetic material called RNA was extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor, and then messenger RNA, or mRNA — the blueprint of what is inside every cell, including tumor cells — was amplified and wrapped in the newly designed high-tech packaging of biocompatible lipid nanoparticles, to make tumor cells “look” like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream and prompt an immune-system response. The vaccine was personalized to each patient with a goal of getting the most out of their unique immune system.

“The demonstration that making an mRNA cancer vaccine in this fashion generates similar and strong responses across mice, pet dogs that have developed cancer spontaneously and human patients with brain cancer is a really important finding, because oftentimes we don’t know how well the preclinical studies in animals are going to translate into similar responses in patients,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the UF Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program and a co-author of the paper. “And while mRNA vaccines and therapeutics are certainly a hot topic since the COVID pandemic, this is a novel and unique way of delivering the mRNA to generate these really significant and rapid immune responses that we’re seeing across animals and humans.”

While too early in the trial to assess the clinical effects of the vaccine, the patients either lived disease-free longer than expected or survived longer than expected.

The 10 pet dogs lived a median of 139 days, compared with a median survival of 30 to 60 days typical for dogs with the condition.

The next step, through support from the Food and Drug Administration and the CureSearch for Children’s Cancer foundation, will be an expanded Phase I clinical trial to include up to 24 adult and pediatric patients to validate the findings. Once an optimal and safe dose is confirmed, an estimated 25 children would participate in Phase 2, said Sayour, an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery and the department of pediatrics in the UF College of Medicine, part of UF Health.

For the new clinical trial, Sayour’s lab will partner with a multi-institution consortium, the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, to send the immunotherapy treatment to children’s hospitals across the country. They will do this by receiving an individual patient’s tumor, manufacturing the personalized vaccine at UF and sending it back to the patient’s medical team, said Sayour, co-leader of the Immuno-Oncology and Microbiome research program at the UF Health Cancer Center.

Despite the promising results, the authors said one limitation is continued uncertainty about how best to harness the immune system while minimizing the potential for adverse side effects.

“I am hopeful that this could be a new paradigm for how we treat patients, a new platform technology for how we can modulate the immune system,” said Sayour, the Stop Children's Cancer/Bonnie R. Freeman Professor for Pediatric Oncology Research. “I am hopeful for how this could now synergize with other immunotherapies and perhaps unlock those immunotherapies. We showed in this paper that you actually can have synergy with other types of immunotherapies, so maybe now we can have a combination approach of immunotherapy.”

Graphic abstract

Highlights

• RNA-LPAs mimic dangerous emboli for lymphoreticular entrapment and systemic immunity
• Systemic immunity resets both the peripheral and intratumoral milieu via IFNAR1/RIG-I
• RNA-LPAs are safe and effective tumor re-modulators in canines with spontaneous gliomas
• RNA-LPAs reprogram the TME and elicit adaptive immunity in human GBM patients

Summary Cancer immunotherapy remains limited by poor antigenicity and a regulatory tumor microenvironment (TME). Here, we create “onion-like” multi-lamellar RNA lipid particle aggregates (LPAs) to substantially enhance the payload packaging and immunogenicity of tumor mRNA antigens. Unlike current mRNA vaccine designs that rely on payload packaging into nanoparticle cores for Toll-like receptor engagement in immune cells, systemically administered RNA-LPAs activate RIG-I in stromal cells, eliciting massive cytokine/chemokine response and dendritic cell/lymphocyte trafficking that provokes cancer immunogenicity and mediates rejection of both early- and late-stage murine tumor models. In client-owned canines with terminal gliomas, RNA-LPAs improved survivorship and reprogrammed the TME, which became “hot” within days of a single infusion. In a first-in-human trial, RNA-LPAs elicited rapid cytokine/chemokine release, immune activation/trafficking, tissue-confirmed pseudoprogression, and glioma-specific immune responses in glioblastoma patients. These data support RNA-LPAs as a new technology that simultaneously reprograms the TME while eliciting rapid and enduring cancer immunotherapy.

Mendez-Gomez, Hector R.; DeVries, Anna; Castillo, Paul; et al.(2024)
RNA aggregates harness the danger response for potent cancer immunotherapy Cell https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.04.003

© 2024 Cell Press.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

---

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This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.

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Creationism in Crisis - How Sabretoothed Cats Were Avoiding Broken Teeth - Before 'Creation Week'

Saber-toothed cat. Smilodon fatalis

Massimo Molinero

Smilodon fatalis skull

The double-fanged adolescence of saber-toothed cats | Berkeley

As an example of daft, Heath-Robinson design, the teeth of the North American sabre-toothed cat, Smilodon fatalis is a good as it gets. Obviously, having huge canine teeth with which to rip the throat out of large prey and so subdue it quickly, has some advantages, but the trouble is that the longer they are, the more likely they are to break, and broken teeth for a Smilodon could well have meant starvation and death. There needs to be a trade-off between ever-bigger teeth and death due to breakages.

And typical of creationism’s daft designer is the Heath-Robinson solution to a simple problem - you've guessed it, another layer of complexity. Instead of losing their 'milk teeth' like many mammals do as their head and mouth grows, Smilodon kept its milk teeth to act as a sort of splint for the adult Sabre tooth, reducing the lateral strain on the adult teeth until the adult was about 30 months old, by which time it had probably learned how to minimise lateral stress on its teeth.

This was discovered by Paleontologist Jack Tseng, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has published his findings in an open access paper in the journal The Anatomical Record. It is also explained in a University of California news release by Robert Sanders:

Uninteligent Design - Bacteria Have A Defence Against The Viruses Designed To Infect Them

Bacterium infected by phage viruses

Illustration: Getty Images

Structural model at atomic resolution of bacteriophage T4

Dr. Victor Padilla-Sanchez, PhD via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Study details a common bacterial defense against viral infection

Creationism's latest hobbyhorse, designed by Michael J Behe to revive the flagging fortunes of his Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy and the abysmal failure of his Intelligent [sic] Design ploy to get creationism inserted into the US public school science curricula at US taxpayers' expense, is the silly notion of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution'.

This unintelligently designed strategy contains the seeds of its own failure at being regarded as a science because it starts off with the assumption that all species were created perfectly by a perfect creator, in compliance with Christian superstition, and so any mutation must be devolutionary away from that perfection. Mutations are called 'genetic entropy', so incorporating the idiotic notion that genetic 'information' is subject to the same law of physics as energy, so the Second Law of Thermodynamic make evolution impossible.

This is supposed to make creationists think Darwin must have been wrong because mutations can't improve fitness, being devolutionary, not evolutionary because of 'genetic entropy'. It ignores the fact that only an improvement in fitness in a given environment can produce more descendants than a deleterious mutation because fitness is defined as the ability to survive and reproduce. How increased fitness can be defined as a reduction in perfection is never explained because Behe 'forgot' to define 'perfection' leaving his marks to assume it means something made by their god.

And this daft notion is now cited by creationists to explain why an intelligent, omniscient and supposedly omnibenevolent god would design parasites. These are now explained as devolved from some initial perfection because of 'genetic entropy' made possible by Adam & Eve's 'sin' - Which is not religious superstition, because it was a historical fact! Got it!

So, we now have an explanation for bacteria, viruses and other parasites, that absolved creationism's god of any responsibility for them while blaming humans for their 'devolution'. However, the problem for this childish nonsense arises when we have parasites on those parasites, such as viruses that infect bacteria - how are bacteria responsible for Adam & Eve's sin and if they aren't why are they being punished for it?

Then it gets even more bizarre when we discover that many bacteria have mechanisms for protecting themselves from these viruses. How can 'devolution' produce an improvement in the organism's ability to survive and reproduce, and in what sense is an improvement a reduction in perfection?

Unintelligent Design - How the Periodic Cicadas Evolved

17-year cicada, Magicicada septendecim

Image: © Ed Reschke-Stone/Getty Images

13-year cicada, Magicada tridecima

Billions of cicadas are about to emerge from underground in a rare double-brood convergence

If it hasn't happened yet, it will do soon. The largest brood of 13-year locusts is about to emerge simultaneously with the mid-western brood of 17-year locusts - and even that only happens every 221 years.

The mathematically-minded will have noticed something about the periodicity of these insects - they are prime numbers (i.e. numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1) ad there is a very good evolutionary reason for this - it makes it harder for a potential predator to synchronise with these emergencies because, since there are no periods that would coincide exactly with these primes other than the prime itself and a 2, 3, 4 or more period would only coincide with an emergence of these cicadas every 26, 39 and 52 years respectively for the 13-year locust, longer for the 17-year locust.

Because these broods only emerge in the same year, they form an effectively isolated genetic population and yet these two broods appear to be identical in appearance, song and genetics, so it will be interesting to see how they interact, although they occupy different geographical areas, so overlap is relatively rare.

As a strategy to avoid predation, this takes some beating in terms of intelligent stupid design, but there is a nasty little twist to the story, as I will relate later...

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a creative commons license, John Cooley, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, USA and Chris Simon, Senior Research Scientist of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, USA explains the significance of this event from the point of view of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Their article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Malevolent Design News - The Superbug, Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff), May Be Developing Resistance to Vancomycin - Design or Evolution?

Clostridium difficile (C. diff)

Treatment for Deadly Superbug C. diff May Be Weakening - University of Houston

The latest rabbit hole Michael J Behe has driven the creation cult into is the daft notion of 'Genetic Entropy'. This was introduced following the failure of the Discovery Institute to trick the courts in the USA into declaring that 'Intelligent [sic] Design' is real science and so should be foist on impressionable children in science class at taxpayers’ expense.

The notion of 'Genetic Entropy' plays on what used to be presented as an anti-evolution argument - the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that a closed system tends to disorder (increased entropy), so evolution can't increase order and complexity. This ignores the fact that Earth is not a closed system, of course, and relies on the scientific illiteracy of its target marks. And it looks nice and sciencey - something that creationists all crave while purporting to reject science.

So, Genetic Entropy starts off with the assumption that every species was created perfect and then, because Adam and Eve allowed 'Sin' to enter the world, these 'perfect' genes have been getting progressively less perfect. Now, this isn't Bible literalism, obviously, because that would make 'Genetic Entropy' religion, not science! Got it!

I posted this in an Evolution Vs Creation Facebook group. Creationists appear to be pretending not to have seen it.

The problem then is, how can increasing 'entropy' lead to greater fitness in a given environment? It can't of course because unlike the random process of mutation, there is no selective element which can produce more descendants from a worse genome, and unless it is getting worse, in what possible sense of the word can it be getting less perfect?

So, faced with something like increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, creationists in Michael J Behe's latest rabbit hole have only two ways to go. They can't argue that increased entropy is leading to an improved genome (from the perspective of the bacterium) because that would mean 'genetic entropy' is leading towards greater perfection. That then leaves them with the unenviable choice of design or evolution, and for design, read 'malevolence' because increasing antibiotic resistance increases the ability of the bacterium to make us sick, and any omniscient designer would know that.

IOW, Michael J Behe's attempt to resuscitate the Discovery Institute's flagging 'Wedge Strategy' has resulted in his fundamentalist cult having to choose between the twin 'evils' of blasphemy or evolution!

The latest twist in the evolutionary arms race between bacteria and human medical science is in the increasing weakness of the antibiotic of choice for Clostridium difficile (C. diff), vancomycin, against which C. diff appears to be developing resistance. This was discovered by researchers at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy, Texas, USA, who have just published their findings in the Journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, sadly behind a paywall with only the abstract available. However, their work is described in a University of Houston news release:

Unintelligent Design - Rotten Tomato For The Bumbling Designer - Or How To Create Unnecessary Complexity

Left three images: close-ups of tomato trichomes where acylsugars are produced. These sticky chemicals act as natural flypaper for potential pests. On the right: a close-up of tomato plant roots covered in small hairs.

Credit: Rachel Kerwin

Uncovering a ‘parallel universe’ in tomato genetics

Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer, unlike a normal intelligent designer worthy of the name, seems to have a moto:

"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing twice, in two different ways".

However, even for someone familiar with all the different ways creationism's putative designer has designed for doing the same thing - flight, swimming, body-plan, respiratory systems and eyes, to name but a few - and the regularity with which its 'designs' turn out to be the opposite of what an intelligent designer would design, it will come as no surprise that it has managed to surpass itself with the design of two different metabolic pathways for doing the same thing in the same plant!

Scientists at Michigan State University, Robert Last, have discovered that tomato plant roots produce defensive sugars - acylsugars - by two different metabolic pathways.

And, as an added embarrassment for the creation cult, they have shown that these two pathways came about as a result of new genetic information arising by accidental gene duplication almost 17 million years before they believe Earth existed.

Acylsugars are a class of very sticky sugars produced in specialized cells in the tip of the tricomes of plants of the tomato (Solanaceae) family, which includes aubergines, potatoes, nightshades, peppers and tobacco. Their purpose appears to be to act as a sort of natural flypaper. However, they are also found in the roots of tomato plants, but the root acylsugars are different enough from the tricome acylsugars to almost warrant a separate class of sugars.

It was while investigating the reason for this difference that the Michigan State University team discovered what they termed a 'parallel universe' of metabolic pathways and the genes that control them. They discovered that if you knock out the genes for making root acylsugars, this doesn't affect their production in the tricomes and if you knock out the genes that control the tricome production, acysugars are still produced in the roots.
The team’s findings are the subject of an open access paper published recently in Science Advances. They also explain the background to the study in a Michigan State University news release:

Unintelligent Design - The Brilliant Way Bacteria Evade Our Immune System - Malevolent Design or Incompetent Designer?

Burkholderia thailandensis (purple) uses cellular components (yellow) to form membrane protrusions from one host cell to another (green).

Burkholderia pseudomallei, a Gram-negative rod, straight or slightly curved, with bipolar staining

The enemy within: How pathogens spread unrecognized in the body - Biozentrum

Here's a conundrum for intelligent [sic] design creationists. Scientists working at Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland with colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore, have discovered how the bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei that causes the serious tropical disease, melioidosis, manages to evade our immune systems to make us sick.

What information do you have on the origins of the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei and what it causes in humans? Burkholderia pseudomallei is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes melioidosis, a potentially fatal infectious disease primarily found in Southeast Asia and Northern Australia. The bacterium is commonly found in soil and water in endemic regions. It was first identified by Alfred Whitmore and C.S. Krishnaswami in 1912 in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). The name "melioidosis" is derived from the Greek word "melis," meaning "distemper of asses," as the disease was initially identified in horses. B. pseudomallei can infect humans and a wide range of animals through various routes, including inhalation, ingestion, or through breaks in the skin. In humans, it can cause a spectrum of symptoms ranging from localized skin abscesses and fever to more severe forms of pneumonia, septicemia (bloodstream infection), and multiple organ abscesses. Melioidosis can be challenging to diagnose due to its diverse clinical manifestations and can mimic other diseases, making it important for clinicians in endemic areas to consider it when evaluating patients with febrile illnesses. Treatment of melioidosis typically involves prolonged antibiotic therapy with drugs such as ceftazidime, meropenem, or imipenem, followed by oral antibiotics such as trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole to prevent relapse. However, antibiotic resistance in B. pseudomallei is a growing concern, particularly in regions where the disease is endemic. Prevention strategies include avoiding contact with contaminated soil and water, wearing protective clothing during outdoor activities, and practicing good wound care.

The conundrum is, was this malevolently designed or is it the result if incompetent design?

The problem for creationists is that they believe the human immune system was intelligently designed to protect us from the bacteria and other organisms their putative designer god had designed to make us sick, and yet not only does it not work as intended but many of the harmful parasites from which we suffer seem to have been designed to avoid our immune system, some of them by ingenious ways, like the bacterium in question, B. pseudomallei.

It's hard to reconcile the difference between a designer who can't design a functional immune system and one who is genius enough to design some of the extremely clever and sophisticated mechanisms for evading our immune system. The idea that these could be one and the same entity is almost laughable unless the answer is that the inadequate immune system and the ingeniously designed parasites are all part of the same malevolent plan to make us sick.

What B. pseudomallei does to avoid being detected by the immune system, once it gets inside a cell, is cause the cell to make special tubes connected to other cells, through which it can pass without going outside the cell again, where it would be recognised as a pathogen. In this way it spreads throughout a tissue without the victim's immune system even being aware of it.

The research team have published their findings, in the open access, online Cell Press journal, Cell Host & Microbe and explain it in a press release from The University of Basel, Biozentrum:

Unintelligent Designer - How Creationism's Idiot Designer Competes With Itself To Overcome The Problems It Designs

Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix.

Photo: Andrei Sourakov.

Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix

Photo: Laura Gaudette via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)

Bella moths use poison to attract mates. Scientists are closer to finding out how – Research News

Imagine a man in your street who designs a brilliant defensive structure to put around your property to keep intruders out, and then invents a brilliant protective suit the intruder can wear so he or she can get through your defensive structure. He then designs an improvement in the defences that overcome the protection the suit provides, and, in a final display of madness, he brilliantly designs a remote control the intruder can use to switch off that improvement and so still burgle your property. He or she then uses the proceeds of the burglary to buy more suits and remote controls to give to friends and acquaintances so they can parasitise you too.

This is exactly the sort of mad inventor that creationists believe designs living organisms and the parasites that predate on them or, in the case of plants, eat their leaves, flowers and seeds. The plant gets given defensive chemicals that deter herbivores from eating them and even kills them if the deterrent doesn't work, and then it redesigns one of the organisms to eat the toxic plant not only with complete impunity, but to help it breed more successfully to produce more organisms to eat the toxic plant.

And it goes one step more and designs the organism so it uses the toxins to defend itself and even attract a mate! All very clever, but you can't help wondering what it’s doing it all for, exactly, and who's side is it on in these wasteful arms races of increasing complexity, like running up a down escalator in order to stand still.

An incomprehensible example of this (incomprehensible in terms of intelligent design; perfectly rational in terms of evolution by natural selection) was revealed a few days ago by researchers from the Department of Biophysics, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA together with colleagues from the Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, who have shown how the Ornate Bella moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, detoxifies the deadly toxins, Pyrrolizidine alkaloids, used as a defence against being eaten by the rattlebox plant amongst others.

And, as a further example of idiot design, the rattlebox plant concentrates its toxin in the seeds - which makes them especially attractive to the bella moth caterpillars. A 'deterrent' that encourages predators to eat its seeds!

How Eyes Evolved - A Worm's Eye View

Vanadis cf. formosa

Photo: Michael Bok

Marvelous eyes, but you be the judge of this sea critter’s beauty. Vanadis is a byname of the Norse goddess of love, Freya.

Photo: Michael Bok

Mediterranean marine worm has developed eyes "as big as millstones"; – University of Copenhagen

Creationists love to cite the eye as an example of irreducible complexity' which could not have evolved by Darwinian step-wise evolution because anything less than a whole eye can't function as an eye.

They even misquote Darwin who, so they claim, admitted the evolution of the eye could not be explained, as though the entire unifying theory of biology rests on the opinion of one man who wrote his books about 160 years ago. But in their usual intellectually and morally bankrupt way, what they fail to do is to give the whole quote in the context in which Darwin used it to show that his theory of evolution was fully capable of explaining how something as complex as an eye could have evolved. It was typical of his style that he would set out a problem for biology, then show how his theory solved that problem. (see the full quote later).

Creationism in Crisis - Evolution Of Improved Hearing In Mammals - 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist's impression of Feredocodon chowi.

© Chuang Zhao

Reconstruction of Feredocodon chowi (right) and Dianoconodon youngi (left).

© Chuang Zhao

New Fossils Change Thinking on Early Mammal Evolution | AMNH

Some 165 million years before their god created the small flat planet with a dome over it that Creationists love hearing about, early mammals were evolving into modern mammals, complete with the tiny bones called ossicles that are essential for hearing. These three small bones transmit sound across the inner ear to the auditory sense organ, the cochlea.

Changes in the mammalian dentition were key to freeing these parts of the jaw joint, according to an analysis of two Jurassic-era mammal fossils which are the subject of articles in Nature. These analyses fill a gap in our understanding of the evolution of mammalian dentition and provide evidence of the transition from part of the jaw to the auditory ossicles - the stapes, malus and incus.

Like almost all of the history of life on earth, this all happened in the very long 'pre-Creation' age when 99.99% of Earth's history happened. The discovery was made by a research team that included Jin Meng of the American Museum of Natural History. Their findings are explained in an American Museum of Natural History press release.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Creates Genetic Defects

UC Irvine-led research team builds first tandem repeat expansions genetic reference maps – UCI News

Creationists assure us that creating new genetic information is impossible without magic performed by the magic creator because they have been sold some half-baked notion that genetic information follows the same laws of physics as energy, so can't be created according to the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

The fact that this is demonstrably wrong since gene duplication is readily observable doesn't stop them trotting out the same refuted claims time after time, but then to a creationist, having a claim refuted is not seen as a reason not to try to get away with it again later. You'll see this repeatedly as an apologist fraud such as William Lane Craig, Ken Ham or Michael J Behe will be comprehensively refuted in a public debate one day, only to try the self-same argument a day or two later on a different opponent in front of a different audience.

Sadly for creationists, however, this tactic leads them down a cul-de-sac where they are left arguing that DNA duplication must have been intelligently designed and, so they will also claim, evidence of intelligent design is evidence that their favourite god (and no other!) exists.

Creationism in Crisis - How Rusty Patched Bumblebee Genes Show Evidence of Evolution Under Intense Selection Pressure

The rusty-patched bumblebee, Bombus affinis

Photo by Jay Watson

The rusty-patched bumblebee, once common in the United States, has declined from about 90% of its former range.

Photo by Jay Watson

Rusty-patched bumblebee’s struggle for survival found in its genes - Warner College of Natural Resources

Evolution, or more precisely change in allele frequency over time, inevitably records selection pressures on a species resulting in a genome which, when correctly read and compared to predecessors, should tell the story of changes in the species environment.

This principle is illustrated by the threatened species of bumblebee, the rusty patch bumblebee, Bombus affinis, which has recently declined by about 90% in the USA and is now considered an endangered species. If this rate of decline continues the species will probably be extinct within 20 years. This level of intense selection pressure has inevitably left its mark on the genome of the species.

On of the problems facing the species is the result of the way bees breed. The queen can normally produce two sorts of egg - a fertilised, diploid egg which will develop into a female and a haploid, unfertilised egg which will develop into a male or drone. The problem arises when there is a high level of inbreeding, due, for example, to a small population - which the bee is now facing. In that situation, the female can produce diploid males because both sets of chromosomes can be identical. Diploid males are normally sterile so reducing the breeding success of the local species.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Designed The CCHF Virus To Kill Us

CCHF Virus

New study shows how the Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells | Karolinska Institutet

Creationists traditionally have a schizophrenic attitude towards viruses. On the one hand, they blame them all on the biblical myth of 'The Fall', so betraying the fact that creationism is not a science like they claim it to be, but fundamentalist Christianity.

On the other hand, as we saw in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, they declared it to be their god's divine punishment for whatever their hobbyhorse was at the time - abortion, same-sex marriage, New Yorkers electing a Democrat, etc., etc., as though their god would inflict a punishment on the whole world for the actions of politicians in America or the way Americans in New York voted. Creationism is nothing if not parochial and ignorant!