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:

Refuting Creationism - Common Origins - Like Humans, Chimpanzees Use Engineering Skills to Make Tools

A Gombe chimpanzee using a termite fishing tool to fish termites.

Credit: Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido

A Gombe chimpanzee using a termite fishing tool to fish termites.

Credit: Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido

Research into chimpanzee ‘engineers’ has implications for understanding human technological evolution | University of Oxford

Not so long ago, it was commonly claimed that humans were exceptional due to their supposedly 'unique' ability to make and use tools. This assertion was often used to reinforce the idea that humans occupied a special position at the pinnacle of creation, justifying the biblical concept of human dominion over the rest of nature.

However, this claim was never credible to anyone observing nature carefully. It was largely promoted by religious authorities to foster a sense of human uniqueness and importance. This, in turn, reinforced belief in a creator god, supported the authority of religious institutions and their clerics, and justified their claims to the right to create laws governing human behaviour.

Scientific research has increasingly exposed the fallacy of this notion of human exceptionalism. Tool-making and tool use in humans are indeed more sophisticated than in other animals, but this ability is far from unique. Many other species demonstrate these abilities, notably chimpanzees—our closest living relatives. The widespread occurrence of tool use in nature strongly suggests this trait was present in a common ancestor we share with other primates. Furthermore, the independent evolution of tool use in species as diverse as birds, bees, and octopuses demonstrates that this capability is not unique to humans but rather a result of natural evolutionary processes.

Another human characteristic, traditionally cited by religious authorities as evidence for special creation and human exceptionalism, has, once again, been shown by science to be better explained as evidence of our evolutionary heritage within the natural world.

And today we have evidence that chimpanzees not only make and use tools but employ sophisticated 'engineering' skill in their choice of the right materials for their construction. It comes in the form of a paper published, open access, in iScience by a team of researchers led by Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido, of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Confirm A Simple Model Of The Universe's First 380,000 Years

Credit: ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration.

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Analysing the cosmic microwave background in high definition has enabled researchers to confirm a simple model of the universe, ruling out many competing alternatives.

Credit: ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration.

Telescope observations reveal universe’s hours-old baby pictures, scientists say - News - Cardiff University

Creationists today face a distinct challenge compared to their predecessors from one or two centuries ago. They must continually devise ways to ignore or dismiss the relentless flow of scientific evidence disproving their beliefs, while simultaneously rationalizing the complete lack of evidence supporting claims of a young Earth, special creation through supernatural means, or the existence of a creator capable of producing a universe from nothing.

Individuals with a normal degree of intellectual honesty, when confronted with overwhelming evidence against their beliefs and a lack of supportive evidence, would naturally see this as grounds for doubt and reassessment. Creationists, however, appear undeterred, convinced that their personal beliefs override scientific evidence without the necessity for evidential justification.

Compounding their difficulties, scientists recently announced a significant advancement: they have mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation—the residual echo of the Big Bang—in unprecedented detail. Utilizing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, this new research reveals conditions in the universe as they existed only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

On the scale of a human lifetime, this is the equivalent of a photograph of a now middle-aged person, taken one hour after they were born, and, in a confirmation of the principle of Occam's Razor, the simplest model is conformed as the correct model.

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.

Refuting Creationism - LECA Was An Asgard Archaea

An artist’s depiction of an Asgard archaeon, based on cryo-electron tomography data: the cell body and appendages feature thread-like skeletal structures, similar to those found in complex cells with nuclei.

Graphic: Margot Riggi,
Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry

Asgard tubulin.

Origin of Life: How microbes laid the foundation for complex cells | ETH Zurich

Recent research indicates that the last universal common ancestor of complex (eukaryotic) cells, which encompass all multicellular plant and animal life, likely originated from the Asgard group of archaea. This ancestor is believed to have formed a symbiotic relationship with an alphaproteobacterium, which eventually evolved into the mitochondrion.

The initial nature of this symbiotic relationship—whether parasitic or predatory—remains uncertain. However, its establishment was pivotal in setting the evolutionary course that led to the diversity of life on Earth. Compelling evidence supporting the Asgard archaea hypothesis has been uncovered by Professor Martin Pilhofer and his team at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. Their findings have been published in the journal Cell and is explained in an ETH news item by Peter Rüegg:

What Our Prophets Never Told Us - Because Our Prophets Hadn't Got A Clue

Euclid’s view of the Cat’s Eye Nebula

ESA - Euclid opens data treasure trove, offers glimpse of deep fields

A point I never tire of making because it contrasts so vividly what the authors of the Bible thought the Universe was like and what science is showing us it is really like, is the ludicrously naive description of a small, flat planet with a dome over it, with the moon, sun and starts attached to the dome.

Don't take my word for it. Open your Bible and read the first few pages:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)

How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.

Now compare that with the view of just a small fragment of the universe that the European Space Agency's space telescope, Euclid, has revealed today:

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.

Refuting Creationism - Our Ancestry In Africa Was More Complex Than We Thought

Early Homo sapiens in Africa

AI-generated image (ChatGPT4.5)

Plaster reconstructions of the skulls of human ancestors

Jose A. Bernat Bacete via Getty Images

Genetic study reveals hidden chapter in human evolution | University of Cambridge

Traditionally, creationists have been fascinated by complexity, wrongly assuming that intricate biological systems are definitive evidence of intelligent design. In reality, simplicity is typically a hallmark of efficient, intelligent design, whereas complexity often emerges from evolutionary processes that accumulate layers of adaptation, frequently to compensate for earlier suboptimal features.

However, one particular form of complexity is likely to provoke considerable confusion among creationists: the evolutionary history of our own species in Africa. Once imagined as a straightforward, linear progression - from Australopithecines through transitional species like Homo erectus, which then migrated out of Africa into Eurasia - the true narrative has proven far more intricate. Homo sapiens evolved within Africa, and subsequently some populations ventured into Eurasia, encountering and interbreeding with the descendants of earlier migrations, notably Neanderthals and Denisovans, who had evolved independently from Homo erectus.

Given our species' propensity to interbreed with closely related hominins - likely facilitated by sexual activity serving recreational and social bonding purposes alongside procreation, a trait possibly shared by our ancestral and cousin species - recent research indicates a highly complex evolutionary pattern. Rather than a simple linear progression, the evolution of humans involved multiple episodes of diversification, genetic isolation, subsequent renewed contact, and interbreeding within Africa's vast landscapes, creating a rich mosaic of genetic heritage.

Refuting Creationism - Human Language Had Evolved At Least 100,000 years Before 'Creation Week'!

Image: MIT News; iStock

World languages (for key, see Wikipedia source)

When did human language emerge? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In stark contrast to biblical literalism's simplistic and contradictory story, recent research provides a very different picture of the origins of human language. According to Bible literalists, there are two versions of how languages come about. In the first, the descendants of each of the sons of Noah spoke different languages; in the second, language originated just five generations after the mythical global flood, when the human population — miraculously expanded from eight closely related survivors - grew large enough to undertake a massive construction project. Supposedly, this project so alarmed God that he intervened by 'confounding their tongues' to stop their cooperation.

In contrast to these Bible stories which compete for the most ludicrous and unlikely, scientists led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently suggested that human language actually evolved between 100,000 and 135,000 years before creationists claim the universe itself existed.

Refuting Creationism - How Chimpanzees Have Evolved For Different Parasites, Including Malaria

Mother and baby chimpanzee in Uganda.

Kevin Langergraber, The Ngogo Chimpanzee Project.

Chimpanzees are genetically adapted to local habitats and infections such as malaria | UCL News - UCL – University College London

It can't be easy making a living as a creationist grifter when science continually undermines your claims, exposing your misrepresentation of evolutionary biology and eroding your credibility — even among the faithful supporters you count on to pay for confirmation of their biases. It must be a relief that your target will rarely, if ever fact check your claims, making them easy victims of your disinformation.

So, you can take comfort in the fact that none of your marks will read this piece of research that shows how chimpanzees are closely related to humans and have evolved over time to adapt to a number of different environments, much the way the ancestors of modern humans adapted when their environment changed from forest to savannah, some 6 million years ago.

Included in the study is how chimpanzees, who have been suffering from malaria for much longer than humans, humans having acquired their most deadly species of the plasmodium parasites from chimpanzees only some 300,000 years ago and possibly as recently as 50,000 years ago, have evolved resistance to the parasite so they now show almost no signs of infection.

Malevolent Design - How a Design Blunder Caused Parkinson's Disease - Or Was It Malevolence?

Two PINK1 proteins are shown attached to the membrane of a mitochondrion for the first time.

Scientists solve decades-long Parkinson’s mystery | WEHI

One of the causes of Parkinsonism is the accumulation of defective mitochondria in neurone leading to the death of these cells and reduced neurotransmitter production. Under normal circumstances, a protein known as PTEN-induced putative kinase 1 (PINK1) attaches to the surface of damaged mitochondria and facilitates their destruction, but when a mutation causes PINK1 to malfunction, this cell hygiene mechanism fails.

The question for creationists is why this cell hygiene process is needed in the first place when an intelligent designer could have designed more robust mitochondria, and why does it depend on an error-prone process where a simple mutation is the gene for a key protein can cause the whole thing to fail?

In fact, of course, what we have here is an example of a layer of complexity being necessary because a fundamental process is suboptimal, when a well-designed process would need no such additional layer of complexity. Additional complexity simply multiplies that opportunity for failure, especially when the additional complexity is itself suboptimal.

As an example of putative intelligent design, the result is exactly what we would expect a mindless, unintelligent process to produce.

Refuting Creationism - Looking Into The Past - To 14 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

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F770W–F277W–F115W shown as an RGB false-colour mosaic
at redshift \(z=14.3{2}_{-0.20}^{+0.08}\)¹¹

Helton, J.M., Rieke, G.H., Alberts, S. et al. (2025)

James Webb Space Telescope reveals unexpected complex chemistry in primordial galaxy | University of Arizona News

It's one thing for creationists to dismiss evidence of life on Earth hundreds of millions, or even a billion or two years before the so-called 'Creation Week' by misrepresenting dating methods and making the absurd claim that the Universe is so finely tuned for life that altering just one parameter slightly would render life impossible, while also claiming that radioactive decay rates were much higher during 'Creation Week', making radiometric dating inaccurate by orders of magnitude.

However, it's quite another to argue that the speed of light was much slower in the past, which would mean that objects appearing to be billions of light-years away are actually much younger than we observe them today.

But a ludicrous and false argument which is not easy to spot by the scientifically illiterate fools that creationists target, was seen by creationists as any reason not to try to get away with it on a different audience.

So, if they don't simply ignore this discovery, it will be interesting to see which lies the creation cult uses to dismiss it. It is the discovery of a galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-0) from just 300 million years post Big Bang, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

This discovery, along with the fact that it is chemically complex, challenges the standard model for galaxy formation as well as the synthesis of 'heavy' elements (i.e., heavier that hydrogen, helium and lithium) because JADES-GS-z14-0 shows evidence of substantial quantities of oxygen. The standard model explains that heavier elements are formed in the end-stages of the life of a sun when its hydrogen supply has all been used up and it collapses under its own gravity. This high gravity forces helium nuclei together to form the heavier elements. When the sun finally explodes in a supernova these elements are thrown into space supplying the next generation os stars with these higher elements.

Malevolent Design - The Sneaky Way The Epstein-Barr Virus Can Cause Multiple Sclerosis

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)

Image: Getty Images

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is very common and can cause glandular fever in young adults.

Image: Getty Images

Genes combined with immune response to Epstein-Barr virus increase MS risk | Karolinska Institutet

To believe in the childish notion of intelligent design by an omniscient, magical designer is to believe two things:

• That it created our shoddy immune system that not only fails to protect us from pathogenic organisms such as bacteria, fungi and virus that frequently infect us.
  
• That it also designed those pathogens and gave them the ability to not only evade our immune system but also turn it against us to ensure we suffer the long-term effects of infections, even when we have eliminated the causative parasite from our bodies.

In other words, creationism is to believe the putative designer is incompetent and/or malevolent.

Refuting Creationism - Common Ancestry Of Mosses and Algae - 600 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

The star-shaped algae Zygnema circumcarinatum shows similar stress reactions to the moss

Photo: Tatyana Darienko

The branching moss Physcomitrium patens, which the researchers used to study stress reactions and compare them to algae.

Photo: Tatyana Darienko.

600 million years of stress: plants retain shared gene hubs - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Like animals, plant life originated in the sea and only colonized land once they evolved the necessary adaptations. For animals, this meant developing mechanisms for breathing air and terrestrial locomotion. For plants, the primary challenge was desiccation, creating strong selection pressure for traits that mitigated water loss. This led to the evolution of a highly connected network of genes, known as a 'hub,' that regulates responses to environmental stress.

So fundamental is this genetic hub to plant survival that it has remained highly conserved throughout evolutionary history.

Malevolent Designer News - How Tuberculosis Is Protected During Airborne Transmission

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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.

US Christianity In Decline - But Not Because Of Evangelical Support For Trump And The Far Right

For Sale: Hundreds of Abandoned Churches. Great Prices. Need Work.

New York Times.

The Northeast is the only region for Southern Baptist growth, analysis shows

Despite the impression that their numbers are growing in line with the volume of the preaching and naked political opportunism, the Evangelical Christian churches in the USA, as represented by the Southern Baptist Convention, has actually seen a near-catastrophic decline in membership over the past 5 years, according to a report by Lifeway Research.

Lifeway Research is an evangelical research firm that is part of Lifeway Christian Resources, an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention that conducts the Annual Church Profile in cooperation with local associations and state conventions affiliated with the SBC.

The SBC annual report is often used to indicate the statistical state of the national denomination, which decreased to 12.9 million members according to the most recent profile in May 2024, marking the lowest numbers since the late 1970s for a denomination that reached its peak at 16.3 million in 2006.

And a deeper dive into the data paints an even bleaker picture for those who make their living from preaching and tithing and generally begging for money from their captive congregations.

The only parts of the USA to have seen a growth in numbers are the New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont which saw a 10% increase between 2018 and 2023.

However, Lifeway Research point out that there are only 30 SBC churches in New England, so this figure could be a statistical anomaly. For instance, an additional three members in a population of 10 is a 30% increase, which is statistically insignificant in a nationwide decline of 3.4 million. All the other states saw a decline of between 8% and 18%, but the 8% decline in the South West was only held up by the high population growth in Texas compared to the rest if the country.

According to this report in the New York Times, more abandoned churches are coming onto the market for conversion to homes, just as they have in the UK.

However, in the UK where there are strict conservation laws, a problem now facing the moribund Anglican Church is that many of its disused churches are in urban settings where they are listed buildings, and there is a general prohibition on building on graveyards, so, in addition to the decline in members, the Anglican Church, and the churches in Scotland and Wales all have the problem of having to maintain disused grade I and II listed buildings.

Refuting Creationism - A Fossil Mammal From 62-Million-Years Before 'Creation Week'

Mixodectes pungens (foreground), small mammals that inhabited western North America 62 million years ago, weighed about 3 pounds, dwelled in trees, and largely dined on leaves. They inhabited the same forests as early primates like Torrejonia wilsoni (background).

Illustration by Andrey Atuchin.

A 62-million-year-old skeleton sheds light on an enigmatic mammal | Yale News

Sometimes, I almost feel sorry for creationists struggling to cling to their childish counter-factual superstition in the face of this constant deluge of contrary scientific evidence. Then I realise they are architects of their own defeat by consciously and conscientiously ignoring this contrary evidence. Remaining ignorant and so remaining wrong is a choice that they don't have to choose just to maintain the self-delusion that they are more expert than the experts.

So, I have no conscience about reporting yet another example of incontrovertible evidence of evolution on an Earth which is much older than creationists prefer to believe. It comes in the form of a reassessment of a 65-million-year-old fossil of an early mammal from the same branch of the evolutionary tree as primate, so is a distant cousin on humans.

Ancient Footprints - Lessons From A French Cave

Human and canine prints found in Chauvet Cave.

M.A. Garcia
Ichnologie générale de la grotte Chauvet
Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française (2005), 102-1 pp. 103-108

Ancient Footprints: The Oldest Evidence of Human-Canine Relationships - History and Artifacts
It's easy to make up eye-catching stories about the past, by imaginatively stringing together a few facts, but is it science?

Whispers of the Ancients

Deep within the labyrinthine recesses of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, where the air hung thick with the scent of damp stone and ancient fires, an eight-year-old girl ventured forth. The elders had warned her — that part of the cave was forbidden. It was where the spirits of the great beasts dwelled, where their whispers echoed through the dark, and where even the bravest hunters dared not tread alone.

But the girl was no hunter—yet. And she was not alone.

By her side padded a massive wolf, its dark fur bristling as it moved with quiet confidence. They had grown together, these two—child and beast—inseparable since infancy, their bond forged in the flickering light of the hearth. The wolf was full-grown now, but the girl was still small, still fragile, her feet unsteady on the slick cave floor. Yet she pressed on, curiosity outweighing caution.

The torch in her hand sputtered as she stepped deeper into the shadows, its flame fed by a crude bundle of dried bark fibres and animal fat. The light danced across the walls, bringing to life the spirits of their ancestors—painted bison, galloping horses, towering mammoths—all shifting and writhing as if breathing. The girl had seen these images many times, had heard the shaman’s tales of how they held the souls of the animals her people hunted. But tonight, they seemed different. More alive. Watching.

Her wolf moved ahead, silent, its keen senses attuned to something unseen. The girl’s bare feet left faint imprints in the cool clay, slipping now and then, leaving streaks where she caught herself. Her companion, ever sure-footed, made no such mistakes. Their prints ran parallel, weaving through the traces of cave bears long gone—the ghosts of the great beasts that had once roamed this cavern.

Refuting Creationism - A Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Before 'Creation Week' - And Why Some Survived It

The End-Permian Mass Extinction

Ai-Generated Image (ChatGPT4)

Mastodonsaurus

Image: Mark P. Witton

March: Amphibians bounce-back from Earth’s greatest mass extinction | News and features | University of Bristol

The thing about mass extinctions, apart from the fact that they occurred so long before creationists dogma says there was even a universe, is that they refute any notions of a planet fine-tuned for life, or any notions of a perfect creator creating all life as it is today. In fact, it was the growing interest in palaeontology and the growing realisation that the fossil record contained so many extinct species, which caused people to start to question the notion of divine creation by a perfect god.

It was also the existence of so many intermediate fossils and series showing progressive change over time that fostered the idea of evolutionary change, although, until Darwin and Wallace thought of evolution by natural selection, how it worked was a matter of speculation.

The end-Permian mass extinction was one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth - a history, 99.9975% of which occurred before creationists think their little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, that creationists like to imagine was the entire universe.

However, fortunately for subsequent life on the planet, and without whom it is unlikely that humans would exist, a handful of species survived, most notably some amphibians.

New Book - The Evolution of Creationism: How Creationism Has Adapted To Survive

AI Generated image (ChatGPT4)

Creationism should have faded into obsolescence long ago, having been thoroughly disproven by the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution, in stark contrast to the total absence of evidence for a creator or any plausible explanation of how an unproven entity could create anything. Its continued persistence is primarily due to the efforts of a small group of vocal advocates who, in their pursuit of preserving their stake in the creationist movement, have abandoned any semblance of intellectual or personal integrity. These individuals have launched a concerted campaign of deliberate misrepresentation of science, while intentionally fostering profound ignorance among their audience to protect their interests.

The irony is that the creationist organisations such as the Deception Institute are having to adapt their tactics and make subtle changes to how they sell creationism in view of the (mostly) hostile changes in the legislative, educational and scientific environment in which they compete with science in the market place of ideas in exact mimicry of the natural evolutionary process they try to deny and misrepresent.

My latest book, written with the assistance of the AI client, ChatGPT4, the eighth in the series on Intelligent Design, describes how creationism has been adapted to try to compete with science in the struggle for the resource of public and scientific opinion on which it depends.

I use AI to research the subject and provide detailed descriptions of events and how the creationist movement has responded. AI can, in minutes, research and fact-check, then synthesise its findings into a few well-written paragraphs, something that would take weeks to do manually.

From the book's introduction:

Creationism has never been a static ideology. While the core belief in a divine creator remains unchanged, the arguments and strategies used to oppose evolution have continuously adapted. From early biblical literalism to modern Intelligent Design, the Anti-evolution movement has undergone significant transformations in response to scientific discoveries, legal challenges, and cultural shifts.

Refuting Creationism - A Giant Scorpion from 125 million years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossilized scorpions are extremely rare. J. longchengi is only the fourth terrestrial species found in China.

Image credit: NIGPAS

Jiangsu researchers discover 125-mln-year-old scorpion fossil | ENGLISH.JSCHINA.COM.CN

Some years ago, on holiday in Northern Greece, myself my eldest two children were exploring an old quarry which had been used as a local rubbish dump. I had come across it the day before and had told my children that this was just the sort of place to find scorpions. True to my prediction, as I turned over a flat piece of plywood, there in all their glory were two pale yellow scorpions! I gently pressed one down with a stick so my children could watch it sting the stick with a series of rapid jabs with its tail.

Fortunately, they were relatively small compared to the scorpions that lived in what is now China in the Mesozoic in that long period of history from before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it, when 99.9975% of Earth's history happened, giant venomous scorpions lived in what is now China, 125 million years ago. Jeholia longchengi was around 4 inches (10 cm) long and was a key species within the food chain of the Cretaceous ecosystem.

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Had Reached All Seven Habitable Continents Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A Chukchi reindeer herder.
The Chukchi are an ethnic group native to Siberia.

Image credit: Natalie Fobes via Getty Images.

Most scientists think that humans reached Australia at least 50,000 years ago. Here, an Indigenous man holds traditional weapons during a ceremonial dance at a festival in Cape York, Australia.

Image credit: chameleonseye via Getty Images.

When did modern humans reach each of the 7 continents? | Live Science

Modern humans had dispersed out of Africa and populated every continent except Antarctica, thousands of years before creationism's little god created a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East and claimed it was the entire Universe, according to creationist mythology.

So, what was the timeline of this dispersion?

After our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, some eventually ventured out, trekking and voyaging across the world.

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.

Malevolent Designer News - The Clever Way The Herpes Virus Gets Reactivated

UVA IDs Trigger for Those Annoying Cold Sore Flare-ups

The herpes viruses are ingenious designs of creationism's divine malevolence which are highly infectious and, once infected, you have them for life.

Of course, there is no point in designing a virus to just live inside its hosts cells doing nothing to increase the suffering in the world, so they come with a number of responses to various triggers which cause them to proliferate and start infecting other people.

Since these abilities are undoubtedly beneficial to the virus, there is no rational way that this can be presented as 'devolution' from some assumed created perfection - the forlorn attempt by Michael J. Behe to excuse the Christin god from culpability for parasites.

However, William A. Dembski, another Deception Institute Fellow, claims that anything which a gene produces must have been specified by an intelligent designer, so followers of the ID cult are obliged by dogma to give credit to their preferred creator deity for the herpes virus.

Now researchers at the University of Virginia have discovered a surprising way in which herpes can be reactivated, and, true to creationism's divine malevolence's form, it takes advantage of the hosts response to other infections and rides piggy-back on the hosts immune system - an immune system the same alleged designer designed to protect us from the viruses it designed to make us sick (if you believe that childish superstition).

The Herpes virus can respond to a protein produced by cells subject to stress which normally activates the immune system. However, the herpes virus is reactivated and starts producing lots of new virus particles, so the sufferer becomes infectious again and infects lots of other people. Then, job, jobbed, the herpes virus goes back into hiding to wait for the next chance to be reactivated and begin to replicate again, often many years later.

Malevolent Designer News - How Brain Cancer Turns Our Immune System Against Us

The Wistar Institute Discovers a Promising Target in Brain Cancer - The Wistar Institute

It's an old trick often used by creationism's divine malevolence to turn a host's immune system against it and instead work for the parasite.

And, according to a discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute, this is exactly what one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer does by reprogramming the white blood cells known as neutrophils, so they supress any further immune response to the cancer.

Of course, whether you accept that or not depends on whether you've fallen for the disinformation promulgated by Deception Institute fellows such as William A Dembski and other leading apologists for the intelligent design cult. Dembski, for example, promotes the notion that genes which produce any given functional protein only do so if they've been given 'complex specified information' to enable them to produce that particular protein.

His presuppositional circular reasoning goes something like, the output from a gene must have been intentional and intent implies sentience, so an intelligent designer must have supplied the information in order to achieve a desired outcome. This of course ignores the fact that mutation and selection occurs in a gene pool consisting of millions of cells and not as a single event in a single cell. In a population of a million cells, the million to one chance mutation arises on average once every cell generation.

A cancer, which is a collection of cells in a hostile environment, can evolve by natural selection to survive and replicate in that environment, so the outcome will depend on the result of an evolutionary arms race.

But, using Dembski's self-referencing logic, believers in intelligent design have to accept that the 'complex specified information' that enables brain tumours to reprogram neutrophils and so supress the immune system, must have been provided by an intelligent designer to achieve exactly that result, because, so he wrongly argues, mutation and natural selection alone can't produce a strategy for survival.

The bad news for supporters of Dembski's divine malevolence is that the discovery by researchers at the Wistar Institute may have tipped the balance in the arms race between human medical science and the malevolent designer in favour of human medical science, in that it suggests a form of treatment for this type of brain cancer.