Unintelligent Design News - Hawkmoths Use Beetles to Protect Themselves From Parasitic Wasps.

Egg-laying Manduca sexta female. The moth is bending its abdomen to the underside of the leaf to lay an egg. On the leaf at the top of the image, a deposited egg can already be seen on the left edge.

Danny Kessler, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Unexpected benefits from food competitors | Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology

Imagine you're a Creationist fraud, trying to convince your dupes that biological diversity only happens because an intelligent, supernatural designer designs it that way and you're presented with the following example. The question is, how on earth can you present it as the work of an omniscient, omnipotent intelligence which is in full conformity with the Bible's account of a supposedly omni-benevolent designer God, as required by the Creationist oath and to ensure you get paid?

The example you'd need to explain is that of the gravid tobacco hawkmoths, Manduca sexta, that is dependent on the presence of a competitor for food resources, the three-lined potato beetle, Lema daturaphila, on the plants on which it chooses to lay its eggs, because the presence of these beetles makes the plant less easily detectable for the endo-parasitic wasp, Cotesia congregata. The wasps prefer plants not infested with the beetle, preferring instead those infested only by the hawkmoth - a difference they detect by scent receptors. The plants emit different odours depending on which insect is eating their leaves. In the case of infestation by Lema daturaphila, the plants emit α-copaene, one of about 70 odours, for which the moths have receptors.

This was discovered by scientists working at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany, led by Dr. Markus Knaden. Here is how the Max Planck Institute press release explains it:

A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has found that gravid tobacco hawkmoths (Manduca sexta) show an unusual preference for Datura plants that are already infested with leaf beetles when laying their eggs. The beetles and their larvae actually compete with tobacco hornworms, the larvae of Manduca, for food. Plants infested by beetles change their odor profile and increase the production of the substance alpha-copaene, making them, however, more attractive to tobacco hawkmoths. Despite food competition, tobacco hornworms seem to benefit from their mothers’ choice of such host plants because in the presence of beetles and their larvae they are better protected from parasitic wasps that avoid beetle-infested plants. The researchers were also able to identify the tobacco hawkmoths' olfactory receptor that controls this behavior (Current Biology, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.12.021)

By choosing the best possible oviposition site, many insects set the course for the best possible development of their offspring: There should be enough food available and the larvae that hatch from the eggs should be as safe as possible from pathogens and predators. In an earlier study, the research team led by Markus Knaden and Bill Hansson from the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology had already been able to demonstrate that tobacco hawkmoths avoid laying their eggs on plants where they smell the feces of their conspecifics. "This is apparently their way of avoiding food competition. Therefore, we wondered whether the moths also avoid plants infested by other herbivorous insects," first author Jin Zhang summarizes the question of the current study.

To be honest, we were a little frustrated at first because we had expected the experiments to confirm our initial hypothesis, namely that egg-laying tobacco hawkmoths avoid food competitors. In our case, however, the unexpected observation suddenly made sense when we realized that beetle-infested plants smell quite differently and that parasitoid wasps, which often use plant odors to find their host insects, are less efficient at detecting tobacco hornworms on beetle-infested plants.

Dr. Markus Knaden, Co-senior author. Project leader
Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany

However, behavioral experiments with sacred datura (Datura wrightii), which were infested by the three-lined potato beetle Lema daturaphila, resulted in an unexpected surprise: Quite obviously, female tobacco hawkmoths even preferentially laid their eggs on these Datura plants, compared to plants that were not infested by the beetles.

In nature, it is not always possible to avoid all dangers and at the same time select a place with abundant food. For example, studies suggest that up to 90% of Manduca sexta caterpillars are parasitized by the wasp Cotesia congregata. This parasitoid wasp lays its eggs in the caterpillars and transmits pathogens. Parasitized tobacco hornworms usually die, when the wasps’ offspring hatches.

The researchers used this knowledge to study the seemingly strange behavior of the tobacco hawkmoths in more detail. They analyzed the odor Datura plants emit when they are infested by three-lined potato beetles and compared it with control plants without infestation. And, finally, they noticed an unusual increase of the substance alpha-copaene in the plants' odor bouquet.

How the moths detect and process this odor was the next question the team answered. Since tobacco hawkmoths have about 70 odorant receptors that would be potential candidates for detecting alpha-copaene, it would have been very time-consuming to test them all individually. Instead, a combination of complex molecular methods allowed the scientists to reduce the number of candidates from about 70 to 6, and finally identify Or35 as the odorant receptor activated by alpha-copaene and probably involved in oviposition.

Our results show that in nature, simple explanations are often not sufficient. Tobacco hawkmoths do not only have to take into account, whether a plant is a good food substrate for their offspring, but also whether potential competitors are already present, and whether the presence of these competitors could even help to hide from predators.

Bill Hansson, Co-senior author.
Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany.

The researchers also examined the odor-guided behavior of the parasitoid wasps. Choice experiments in which the wasps could choose between two odors revealed, on the one hand, that Cotesia congregata wasps preferred the odor of plants on which tobacco hawkworms were feeding to control plants. On the other hand, these behavioral assays also demonstrated that the wasps avoided the odor of plants that were infested by Lema daturaphila beetles. These results were confirmed by assays in an experimental tent containing Datura plants infested only by tobacco hawkmoths or by tobacco hawkmoths and beetles. Wasps also avoided plants with beetles in this setting.

Although the development of tobacco hornworms on plants that are additionally infested by beetles is impaired in comparison to the development of caterpillars on non-infested plants, the mother moths accept this disadvantage when laying their eggs. The advantage of protecting their offspring from parasitic wasps must therefore outweigh the disadvantage of food competition. Such cost-benefit trade-offs play a significant role in many ecological interactions.

Why Datura plants emit different odor depending on the insects that feed on them will be addressed in further studies. Both Manduca sexta caterpillars and the larvae of the three-lined potato beetle Lema daturaphila are chewing insects and cause similar damage to plant tissue. Presumably, microorganisms in the oral secretions of the animals play a role. Interdisciplinary approaches that also focus, for example, on the role of microorganisms in these complex interactions may help to uncover further exciting aspects of the multifaceted interactions between living organisms.

. Sadly, the team's paper published in Current Biology, is behind an expensive paywall, however, their abstract and the paper's highlights are available here and a PDF format version of the entire paper can be downloaded from here.

There is obviously a lot here to unpack for any would-be Creationist fraud to try to explain to a potential dupe:

1. Why would an intelligent designer, even a malevolent one, go to the trouble of creating the Cotesia congregata wasp to predate on the hawkmoth, then give the hawkmoth a way to defend itself against predation by the wasp?
2. Why is the best way for the moth to defend itself, to actively seek out a plant on which a competitor for food for the growing offspring is already feeding, instead of making the wasp find the odour given off by the plants infested by the moth distasteful and therefore repellent? In other words, why involve the beetles at all?
3. Why would an intelligent designer create a parasitic wasp then give its preferred prey species a preference for plants being consumed by a competitor species so making the prey larvae less fit due to the competition, and harder for the parasite to detect?
4. Why does the supposedly intelligent designer appear to be having an evolutionary arms race with itself?
5. If the team are right in their suspicion that it is microorganisms carried by the different insects that cause the plant to produce these odours, so explaining the differences, then why go to such needless complexity to achieve a result that could be achieved without the microorganisms, and so with far less complexity?
6. Why is this apparently malevolent stupidity and poor design a better explanation than that implied by the research team, namely, the dynamic result of competing evolutionary pressures where there is a trade-off for the moth between choosing competition for food and less predation on the one hand, and more food but a high risk of predation on the other; and for the parasitic wasp in choosing moth larvae which are less likely to thrive due to competition for food, because these plants are easier for it to detect than plants were the moth larvae have no such competition?

To evolutionary biologists, and to anyone with a desire to understand how the world works, these results of competing evolutionary forces are endlessly fascinating and drive a desire to understand more and more. To a Creationist, the best they can offer is a self-deceiving strategy for coping with the resulting cognitive dissonance that I wrote about recently in order to maintain their counter-factual delusion. The probability is that, as one of their coping strategies, they will try to explain it all as the result of some mythical 'sin' by humans, who are totally unafected by this complex of relationships and for which they can offer no rational, testable mechanism, so blowing the gaff on the sharade that Creationism is an alternative science and not fundamentalist religious superstition in disguise.

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link

Covidiocy, Conspiracism and Creationist Self-Deception Explained

Why people deceive themselves - Newsportal - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Hard though it can be to understand, the reason people such as antivaxx covidiots, conspiracy theorists and Creationists, hold onto patently idiotic and counter-factual opinions has been explained as a process of self-deception by two researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany and the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

In a paper published on 6 January, 2022, in the journal Philosophical Psychology, Dr. Francesco Marchi and Professor Albert Newen describe four strategies used to stabilise and shield the positive self-image. According to their theory, self-deception helps people to stay motivated in difficult situations. Of course, self-deception is common to all people and not confined to those who hold wackadoodle opinions, but the way they hold doggedly to those patently wrong beliefs is understandable as a strategy for coping with cognitive dissonance.

Evolution News - Science Does it Again! Creationism Refuted by Australian Fossil Discoveries

Fossils from McGraths Flat
Left: a spider. Right: a feather.

Life in the ‘dead’ heart of Australia - The Australian Museum

Two of the major problems Creationism, especially the Young Earth variety, has never been able to overcome are:

1. The lack of evidence for their assertions.
2. The abundant evidence that the childish notion is wrong.

But, since Creationist are well versed in avoiding these problems, the discovery of even more evidence for 2 is unlikely to have much influence on them. Besides, the true test of a dedicated Creationist, of any variety, is that nothing can make them change their mind, because to them, 'faith' trumps even glaringly obvious evidence. In fact, many of them spend vast amounts of time online trying to prove that to themselves and others because the thought that they could be wrong is an existential threat that must be resisted at all costs.

So, here is that evidence for 2, from Australia, as described in an Australian Museum news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Created Another Pandemic

Vibrio cholerae

Tracking down the origin of cholera pandemics | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Creationist mode:

The Coronavirus pandemic is not the only one the world is currently experiencing. It is not generally known in the developed world where clean drinking water has made it a rare disease, but we have been in the midst of a cholera pandemic since 1961 - the seventh in a series of cholera pandemics known to science.

The organism that causes it is a nasty little bacterium known as Vibrio cholerae. It kills around 95,000 people a year and makes another 2.3 million people sick.

Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, and the Institute for Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, City College New York, USA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA, have shown how small tweaks to the bacterial genome may have played a role in the emergence of the seventh pandemic.

The strain causing the current pandemic, known as the El Tor biotype, has a molecular mechanism to help them kill rival bacteria known as the "Type VI secretion system" (T6SS) with which it can inject toxins into rival cells. This was lacking in earlier versions of V. cholerae, so the newer type was able to predominate in the competition for resources.

As any Creationists will tell you, molecular systems such as the T6SS must be designed by an intelligent [sic] designer, so none of that would have happened had not their beloved pestilential, genocidal god not intended it to. This is the same designer who designed the flagellum which enables V. cholerae to be more effective at killing us.

Creationist mode:

However, because they understand the science, the scientists attribute these changes to a mindless natural process called evolution. In the Max Planck Gesellschaft news article explains:

With these findings, we support the theory that microbial competition between bacteria is very important for understanding pathogens and bacterial pandemics. Our research on the cholera bacterium was made possible by an S2 laboratory newly established at the institute. Here, we can conduct experiments with bacterial pathogens under the necessary safety precautions. The study contains some of the first data from the new laboratory.

Daniel Unterweger, co-author
Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
And the Institute for Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany

In their natural environment, bacteria are subject to competition with other bacteria for space and nutrients. In this process, molecular mechanisms help them to hold their own. One such mechanism is the so-called "type 6 secretion system" (T6SS), with which a bacterium transports toxic proteins into a neighboring bacterium and thereby kills it. Thus, cholera bacteria of the seventh pandemic use their T6SS to keep other bacteria in check and presumably more easily cause infection.

Researchers now had the special opportunity to study the T6SS of cholera bacteria from previous pandemics. For this purpose, among other things, the T6SS genome sequence of cholera bacteria from the 2nd pandemic was reconstructed from a museum specimen from the 19th century in a complex procedure and recreated in the laboratory.

In the process, the scientists were able to show that 2nd and 6th pandemic cholera bacteria lack a functional T6SS. As a result, the bacteria of earlier pandemics not only lack the ability to attack other bacteria, they are themselves killed by bacterial strains of the seventh pandemic. This may have been one of the reasons that older cholera strains were displaced by modified cholera strains of the seventh pandemic and are now hard to find.

A Maximum likelihood tree based on core-genome SNP sites of indicated V. cholerae strains. Insertions, deletions and nucleotide substitutions are noted. Classical strains with the same mutations in the large cluster of the T6SS and TsiV1 are highlighted in the same colour. The horizontal bars indicate the mean. B Schematic representation of the sequential acquisition of T6SS mutations among representative classical V. cholerae strains. Arrows highlight the specific changes to the T6SS gene cluster.

Kostiuk, Benjamin; Santoriello, Francis J.; Diaz-Satizabal, Laura; et al (2022)

The team's findings are published, open access, in Nature Communications:

Abstract

The gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae is the causative agent of the diarrhoeal disease cholera and is responsible for seven recorded pandemics. Several factors are postulated to have led to the decline of 6th pandemic classical strains and the rise of El Tor biotype V. cholerae, establishing the current 7th pandemic. We investigated the ability of classical V. cholerae of the 2nd and 6th pandemics to engage their type six secretion system (T6SS) in microbial competition against non-pandemic and 7th pandemic strains. We report that classical V. cholerae underwent sequential mutations in T6SS genetic determinants that initially exposed 2nd pandemic strains to microbial attack by non-pandemic strains and subsequently caused 6th pandemic strains to become vulnerable to El Tor biotype V. cholerae intraspecific competition. The chronology of these T6SS-debilitating mutations agrees with the decline of 6th pandemic classical strains and the emergence of 7th pandemic El Tor V. cholerae.

Kostiuk, Benjamin; Santoriello, Francis J.; Diaz-Satizabal, Laura; Bisaro, Fabiana; Lee, Kyung-Jo; Dhody, Anna N.; Provenzano, Daniele; Unterweger, Daniel; Pukatzki, Stefan
Type VI secretion system mutations reduced competitive fitness of classical Vibrio cholerae biotype
Nature Communications 12, 6457 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26847-y

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Clearly, devotees of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer have some explaining to do now. Their problem is that systems like the T6SS the El Tor biotype of V. cholerae is equipped with are normally waved around as evidence of irreducible complexity, so they are denied the claim that somehow 'sin' creates these mechanisms, not their magic god, who is powerless to prevent it, apparently. But then, since it was pointed out when Michael J Behe started to claim the bacterial flagellum must have been intelligently designed because it is supposedly irreducibly complex', that it had been known for some time that the flagellum was almost certainly the result of evolutionary exaptation of a redundant (or duplicated) similar secretion system (the Type II Secretion System) in an early bacterium, they tend to steer well clear of discussing these systems.

But, however they want to play it, they have to explain why an entity with the powers and abilities to create and then 'improve' things like V. cholerae, should be regarded as one and thr same as the supposedly all-loving god of the Bible and Qur'an, and why it should not be regarded as an evil god who likes nothing more than watching its creation suffer, if such a malevolence actually existed, that is.

Somehow, I'm beginning to doubt that any Creationist with enough courage and personal integrity, and sufficient understanding of this glaring inconsistency in their cult's dogma, is ever going to come forward to explain the curious paradox of a supposedly omni-benevolent god who wants to minimise suffering in the world being one and the same as the designer of these nasty little organisms and why they prefer us to have that view of their beloved sadist rather than accept that they are wrong about evolution.

Evolution News - How Modern Humans Evolved an Improved Protein by a Simple Mutation

Modern humans developed a more effective protection against oxidative stress | Karolinska Institutet Nyheter

It's the same old story. Just when Michael J Behe and his Deception Institute masters are getting their dupes to believe they are onto something with their unintelligently designed 'devolution' hoax, along comes another scientific paper and refutes the entire half-baked notion.

Here, for example is a paper by a team led by Hugo Zeberg at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute. In it they show that humans have a slightly modified gene for an essential protein enzyme, compared to that in other primates and, most relevantly for refuting Creationism's latest hoax, in Neanderthals.

And to make matters worse for Creationism, the mutation involves the simplest substitution in a DNA codon, which results in a substitution of one amino acid in the protein chain for another. This simple substitution does not affect the activity and stability of the enzyme but it is much better than the Neanderthal version in that it doesn't produce nearly so many free oxygen radicals in the cells, so reduces the oxidative stress.

By comparing the large majority of modern humans with the 1-2% of (mostly) south Asian carriers of the Neanderthal version, acquired through interbreeding when moderns and Neanderthals came into contact, the team were able to show that these carriers of this Neanderthal gene were much more susceptible to inflammatory and vascular diseases caused by oxidative stress.

The Karolinska Insitutet news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How SARS-CoV-2 Makes You Sick Long-Term Even If You Survive It.

Representative fluorescence micrographs of purified fluorescent (Alexa Fluor™ 88) fibrinogen (note no ThT added) with added thrombin to form extensive fibrin clots

(A) Fluorescent fibrinogen with thrombin; (B) fluorescent fibrinogen with added spike protein (final exposure concentration 1 ng.ml−1) and thrombin.

Could microclots help explain the mystery of long Covid? | Resia Pretorius | The Guardian

As a special New Year gift to worshippers of Creationism's supernatural sadist, the creator of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, I bring them news of its brilliance in creating a virus that, even if you survive the initial attempt to kill you, can ensure you suffer long-term for your effrontery.

As this Guardian article by Professor Resia (Etheresia) Pretorius, of the Department of Physiological Sciences, Faculty of Science, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa showed, COVID-19 has a nasty little sting in its tail with which it hits back if it doesn't kill you. Professor Resia Pretorius is co-lead author of a paper from last August, which highlighted the high incidence of micro blood clots in patients who had survived COVID-19 and were now suffering from 'Long Covid'.
This is a degree of sadistic mendacity in design of which followers of Creationism's malevolent designer should be proud.

In the article, Professor Pretorius points out that there are now around 100 million people worldwide who suffer with Long Covid. These patients:

Evolution News - How Evolution Transformed a Common Ancestor's Genes to Make Snake Venom and Human Saliva

Venoms in snakes and salivary protein in mammals share a common origin | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University OIST

Here is an interesting paper for at least two reasons:

Firstly, for people who understand evolutionary biology, there is the evidence of common origins in that the genes for producing venom in snakes are also present and produce related proteins in mammals, albeit non-venomous proteins.

Secondly, for Creationist victims of the Intelligent [sic] Design Hoax, there is the complete reliance by the biologists who wrote it on the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection for the explanation, with no hint whatsoever that the imminent collapse of the TOE and its abandonment by science in favour of intelligent [sic] design, or whatever the latest product Creationist frauds are trying to sell their target marks as an alternative to genuine science is, as has been predicted (any day now real soon!) by Creationist frauds, since about 1940. In fact, what would be a historic first where an established scientific theory is replaced by a guess with no supporting evidence, looks about as likely (and as nonsensical) as that of the QAnon 'coming storm' or the return from the grave of John F. Kennedy, Jnr. to overthrow the Biden presidency and reinstall Trump in the Oval Office.

Evolution News - Human Head Lice are Making Nits of Creationists

Mummified man of the Ansilta culture found in the Andes of San Juan, Argentina, dating back approximately 2,000 years

Nits on ancient mummies shed light on South American ancestry

The story of the co-evolution of head lice and humans just got a little more interesting, unless you're a Creationist, in which case it just got a lot more difficult to ignore.

Briefly, the human head louse Pediculus humanus capitis diverged from human body louse, Pediculus humanus humanus, at about the same time that humans started wearing clothes. Pediculus humanus (the common ancestor of the two subspecies) was a close relative of the louse found on Chimpanzees, Pediculus schaeffi. In fact the evolution of these louse species and subspecies maps exactly onto our own evolution, both biologically as we diverged from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, and as we lost body hair and invented clothes (cultural, rather than biological evolution).

Headlice have accompanied humans throughout their entire existence, so this new method could open the door to a goldmine of information about our ancestors

Dr Alejandra Perotti
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Section
School of Biological Sciences
University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

What is even more interesting is the finding of an international team that the cement head lice use to stick their eggs (or nits) to hair, preserves the DNA in the hair cells. This means we can extract far more DNA from the hair of ancient people who also had head lice, than we can from the fossilised or semi-fossilised teeth and bones that were used until now.

So, using the DNA extracted from the lousy hair of human remains in South America, the Reading team, in association with scientists from Argentina, Wales, Oxford, UK and Denmark, were able to discover:

The Covidiot Cull is Forging Ahead in the USA

Covidiot Trumpanzee, antivaxx podcaster and QAnon dupe, Doug Kuzma, has COVID-19 and is unconscious on a ventilator.

Anti-Vaxx Podcaster Reportedly on Ventilator After Attending QAnon-Friendly Event in Texas | Newsweek

The prominent, right-wing, MAGA-hat wearing Trumpanzee and anti-vaxx campaigner, Doug Kuzma, is reportedly seriously ill, sedated and on a ventilator, in a Virginia hospital, with COVID-19, after attending a QAnon rally in Texas. Several other attendees at the rally also became unwell but have claimed they were suffering from 'anthrax poisoning'. Anthrax is a bacterial infection, unlike COVID-19 which is viral, so is easily distinguished from it.

Kuzma is in many ways an example of what happens when you, consciously or unconsciously, buy into a cult and adopt cult-think in place of rational thought. He has a long history of recruiting into the Trumpanzee cult by uncritically repeating any QAnon-originating conspiracy theories and campaigning to persuade the gullible dupes who listen to his raving right Frog News spots, not to get vaccinated. As a right-wing evangelical Christian he has no hesitation in risking the health and welfare of others to serve his ego-tripping self-promotion.

More Evidence of Declining Religiosity in USA

The Bellefonte First Presbyterian Church in Bellefonte, Pa., USA. Founded in 1800 by the same group who founded the borough of Bellefonte in Pennsylvania, held its last service on 21^th December 2021.

'Go in peace': Pennsylvania church founded in 1800 holds last service.

As though to reinforce the recent findings of the Pew Research survey which shows an accelerating decline in affiliation to mainstream churches in the USA, one of the oldest fundamentalist Christian churches in Pennsylvania, The First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, has closed its doors for the last time, attendance having fallen by 87% from about 200 in the 1970s to about 40 before the pandemic and just 25 now.

When it was founded in 1800, the First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte was very much a part of the local political establishment, even holding meetings in the courthouse before the church was built and providing two Pennsylvania governors from amongst its members. The church provided the local civil leadership for the borough and the state at large, which was, for all practical purposes, a local theocracy with no attempt to separate church and state, the local Christian leadership believing it was entitled to rule.

Malevolent Designer News - How Brilliant was Creationism's Favourite Serial Killer?

Viruses enter cells to make copies of themselves and cause infection. One secret to SARS-CoV-2’s success is hiding from the immune system by spreading between cells. This transmission electron micrograph shows COVID-causing virus particles that were isolated from a patient.

Image: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH

SARS-CoV-2 goes ‘underground’ to spread from cell to cell

Creationist mode:

A couple of papers published recently show us just how brilliant and obsessively determined to maximise suffering Creationism's beloved mass murder was when it designed and then subsequently modified the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The first, by a team from Ohio State University, Ohio, USA, led by virology professor, Shan-Lu Liu of the University's Veterinary Biosciences Department and its Center for Retrovirus Research, explains how the virus is designed to evade your immune system by spreading in your body by cell-to-cell spread rather than by being liberated by infected cells to circulate and infect new host cells.

The problem with the latter method was that it brings the virus into contact with circulating antibodies which remain outside the cell. Spreading from cell to cell is a much more efficient method as it circumvents your immune response so far as the antibody part is concerned. This means a wave of infection can spread across tissues relatively unmolested by your immune system.

Brilliant, eh? It seems the malevolent designer learned a valuable lesson from its failed attempt with the SARS-CoV virus that caused the short-lived 2003 SARS outbreak, which was more lethal but only lasted for 8 months. But it's weird how a supposedly intelligent designer would see the immune system it supposedly also designed to protect us from its viruses, as a problem to be overcome! Creationists, however, see having an arms race with yourself as the act of a supremely intelligent [sic] designer.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Mass Murderer Gets a Second Go at Killing You With COVID-19

Immune memory less durable after severe COVID-19, study suggests - UT Health San Antonio

Creationist mode:

This is turning out to be a great day for devotees of Creationism's supernatural sadistic malevolence!

Not only have we learned that its brilliantly redesigned omicron (ο) variant is good at evading the antibodies produced by medical science's vaccines as well as being much more infectious than earlier variants such as δ and α, but we now learn that if it can cause a severe enough case of COVID-19, it will produce a dysfunctional B cell response to the spike proteins, so reducing its victim's ability to fight off future infections. In other words, if it doesn't quite kill you the first time, it makes it more likely to kill you on its second or subsequent try.

Brilliant, eh? Just when you think you've beaten it, it sets you up for a sucker punch.

Creationist mode:

Malevolent Designer News - Update on Omicron - SARS-CoV-2's Brilliant New Design

New Study Adds More Evidence for Omicron Immune Evasion | Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Creationist mode:

A new study by scientists from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York and The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China has provided more evidence of the brilliance of Creationism's putative magic designer in the way it has modified its design of the SARS-CoV-2 virus so it can overcome the efforts of medical science to stop it killing people and making many more sick.

They have shown how the modifications it put in the Omicron (ο) variant help it evade the antibodies produced by the vaccines medical science produced. What the putative intelligent [sic] malevolence spotted was the slight flaw in the vaccines - they are all made by injecting the viral mRNA that produces the virus' spike proteins with which it prizes open a cell to gain entry. This means the antibodies produced in response to the spike proteins that the vaccines produce are specific for the spike proteins on the surface of the virus. This was a quick and easy solution to the immediate crisis caused by the virus but it has meant that the putative malevolence behind the virus only had to think of a way to modify the spike proteins so the antibodies wouldn't attach to them and deactivate them, while retaining their function in prizing open the cell.

It did this with about 30 modifications plus another 20 to other proteins, just to be on the safe-side.

Creationist mode:

At least that is what ID advocates would have to admit to, if they are honest and wish to maintain the childish belief in a magic designer of everything.

Malevolent Designer News - Has Creationists' Favourite Sadist Blundered with Omicron?

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay measurement of serum dilution titers with a 50% effective concentration (EC₅₀) of SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD-binding antibodies. The dotted lines indicate the assay limits of detection. Two-tailed P values were determined using the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed rank test with the Holm-Šídák multiple comparison correction. Box plots were generated using the Tukey method. The large box displays the median and IQR. The error bars indicate 1.5 times the IQR or the furthest outlier, whichever is closer to the median. All individual data points are displayed as filled circles.

Source: Bates, T.A., et al 2021

Super immunity may be sparked by getting Covid while double-vaccinated | The Independent

It's early days yet and what studies there have been have been mostly inconclusive and tentative, but it's beginning to look like the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could be nearing the end as the virus is facing extinction.

If you're a Creationist, you'll have to see this as a blunder by the supernatural malevolence you believe was behind the design and adaptations of the virus. If, on the other hand, you're rational with the thinking abilities of a normal adult, you will see this as the inevitable result of a natural, evolutionary process.

The reason for this slight optimism, and it is slight so far as the data sets are small and may not be representative of the general human population, is a couple of recent studies. The most recent being one from the Oregon Health & Science University which shows that people infected after being vaccinated (the so-called breakthrough infection where the virus manages to overcome the protection given by the antibodies produced as a result of the vaccines) go on the develop a 'super immunity' to the virus with serum antibody levels of up to 1000 times greater than with vaccination alone.

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Beloved Sadist Winning the Antibiotic Arms Race?

In order to distinguish bacteria with and without plasmids, and thereby with and without antibiotic resistance, the researchers modified the bacteria genetically. The red cells carry plasmids, while green cells have lost the plasmid. The bacteria were studied under different conditions. In this case the bacteria are cultivated in small, round alginate beads.

illustration from scientific article in NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes.

Danish researchers discover new hiding place for antibiotic resistance – University of Copenhagen

Creationist mode:

It's beginning to look like Creationism's divine malevolence is winning its antibiotic arms race with medical science.

Danish scientists working at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that it has even thought of a way to overcome one of the treatments used against antibiotic resistant bacteria - discontinuing their use for a period to allow the non-resistant forms to reassert their dominance in the bacterial population, before hitting them with the antibiotic again.

It had been assumed that the bacterial population would lose their resistance with this 'rest' period, but the scientists have shown that bacteria have been designed to 'hide' their resistance, so this assumptions needs to be reassessed and modified.

As the Copenhagen University press release accompanying the research published open access in the journal NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes, explains:

Christian False Witnessing News - David Barton is Lying Again

David Barton,
Pseudo-historian and professional liar for Jesus and the gun lobby

The pseudo-historian, David Barton, who earns his living lying for Jesus is also lying for the gun industry in the USA. Apparently, he feels his piety entitles him to an exemption from the commandments which forbids bearing false witness and he knows the extreme right-wing causes he take money for promoting can't be promoted with truth and honesty.

Long-time readers of this blog may recall how David Barton went on American TV to try to fool Americans into believing the US Constitution was taken 'verbatim' straight from the Bible and so America should be a Christian theocracy, by lying about what was in the Bible - a tactic that depends on the fools he dupes taking his word for it and not fact-checking his claims.

Religious right-pseudo historian David Barton insists that gun control will not lessen the death rate in the U.S. because England does not "allow guns and they've got a knife death rate higher than we have in some of our major cities." pic.twitter.com/BOEdBrV7Op

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 17, 2021

He has repeated that tactic, this time to defend and promote the gun lobby (which traditionally provides vast financial support for right-wing politicians and buys political influence at Washington). On 17 Dec, he tried to fool viewers of Victory News, that banning guns would not reduce the death rate because England [sic] does not "allow guns and they've got a knife death rate higher than we have in some of our major cities."

Not only does he appear to be unaware that the UK is not just England (a common enough mistake American's make, but a curious degree of ignorance for someone who poses as a historian!), and guns are banned throughout the UK; he is also lying about the knife death rate in the UK. According to a freely available House of Commons Library research briefing, in the year ending March 2021, there were just 224 homicides involving sharp instruments (including broken bottles) in England and Wales. The worst area was the area covered by West Midlands Police, which includes the major industrial cities of Birmingham, Coventry, West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton where the knife crimes in total, not just deaths, stood at 156 for the same year.

By contrast, according to a 2021 CNN analysis of 40 US Cities:

The rise in violent crime is an epidemic that is happening "all across the country," said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, and a result of three major factors: the impact of Covid-19 on communities and first responders, the fallout of the social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and the surge in gun sales since the start of the pandemic.

At least nine major cities have broken their previous annual homicide records with about three weeks left to go in 2021. There have been 513 homicides this year in Philadelphia, higher than the previous total of 503 in 1990. There have been 230 homicides in Indianapolis, breaking the previous record of 215 set just last year.

These increases are not isolated to any particular region of the country. Other cities with record homicide totals include Louisville, Kentucky; Columbus, Ohio; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tucson, Arizona; Rochester, New York; and Portland, Oregon. Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Nashville are also on pace to reach record homicide numbers by the end of the year.

Los Angeles recorded 352 homicides so far this year, and Chicago has seen 756, with year-to-date increases of 12% and 4% respectively. In Houston, homicides are up 18% from 2020.

In other words, the knife-related deaths in England and Wales (awful though they are), far from being what David Barton lied about, are at levels of which those trying to reduce US gun deaths in the USA can only dream. By contrast, the number of gun deaths in UK is minuscule compared to those in the USA with total anula gun deaths in the entire UK being well below those in an average US city in a month.

Barton's chosen platform from which to lie to America is a right-wing evangelical Christian channel which laughably describes itself on its website as:

VICTORY News is here to bring you daily news you can trust—always delivered in a spirit of faith. Stay informed and encouraged with faith, facts and freedom!

As 'Christians' they would know the power of truth to 'set you free' and so they also know that lies achieve just the opposite. The last thing they want their dupes knowing is the truth when, as a recent Pew Research survey showed, affiliation to the protestant churches in the USA, including the white evangelical churches, is collapsing at an accelearating rate and unaffiliated ('None') numbers are doubling every ten years. They know the only way to keep the faithful inline and paying their tythes is to keep them fooled and enslaved by believing the lies they pump out.

And David Barton knows that too. He also knows how it would hit the profits of the gun industry and so the size of their donations to right wing political causes such as the Repugnican Party if gun sales were curtailed and controlled - which is why he went on a right-wing Christian TV 'news' channel to lie to Americans and probably why the right-wing Christian TV 'news' channel invited him on to lie to Americans.

When you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith is a lie that needs people to believe falsehoods

Tweet

Malevolent Design News - SARS-CoV-2 May Cause Parkinsonism

The SARS-CoV-2 N-protein can interact with α-synuclein in the test tube and help it form amyloid fibrils, a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.

Credit: Adapted from ACS Chemical Neuroscience 2021, DOI: 10.1021/acschemneuro.1c00666

SARS-CoV-2 protein interacts with Parkinson’s protein, promotes amyloid formation - American Chemical Society

Creationist mode:

Scientists working at the University of Twente, Netherlands, have shown a tentative link between infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the onset of Parkinsonism. As any Creationist devotee of the supernatural malevolence, whom they believe created the virus, will tell you, Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer is nothing if not thorough in its determination to cause as much misery and suffering as possible with its new pestilence.

Publishing in the American Chemical Society's journal, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, the team say they have shown, at least in the test tube, the SARS-CoV-2 N-protein interacts with a neuronal protein called α-synuclein and speeds the formation of amyloid fibrils, pathological protein bundles that have been implicated in Parkinson’s disease.

The ACS press release accompanying the publication explains:

In addition to respiratory symptoms, SARS-CoV-2 can cause neurological problems, such as loss of smell, headaches and “brain fog.” However, whether these symptoms are caused by the virus entering the brain, or whether the symptoms are instead caused by chemical signals released in the brain by the immune system in response to the virus, is still controversial. In Parkinson’s disease, a protein called α-synuclein forms abnormal amyloid fibrils, leading to the death of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. Interestingly, loss of smell is a common premotor symptom in Parkinson’s disease. This fact, as well as case reports of Parkinson’s in COVID-19 patients, made Christian Blum, Mireille Claessens and colleagues wonder whether protein components of SARS-CoV-2 could trigger the aggregation of α-synuclein into amyloid. They chose to study the two most abundant proteins of the virus: the spike (S-) protein that helps SARS-CoV-2 enter cells, and the nucleocapsid (N-) protein that encapsulates the RNA genome inside the virus.

In test tube experiments, the researchers used a fluorescent probe that binds amyloid fibrils to show that, in the absence of the coronavirus proteins, α-synuclein required more than 240 hours to aggregate into fibrils. Adding the S-protein had no effect, but the N-protein decreased the aggregation time to less than 24 hours. In other experiments, the team showed that the N- and α-synuclein proteins interact directly, in part through their opposite electrostatic charges, with at least 3–4 copies of α-synuclein bound to each N-protein. Next, the researchers injected N-protein and fluorescently labeled α-synuclein into a cell model of Parkinson’s disease, using a similar concentration of N-protein as would be expected inside a SARS-CoV-2-infected cell. Compared to control cells with only α-synuclein injected, about twice as many cells died upon injection of both proteins. Also, the distribution of α-synuclein was altered in cells co-injected with both proteins, and elongated structures were observed, although the researchers could not confirm that they were amyloid. It’s unknown whether these interactions also occur within neurons of the human brain, but if so, they could help explain the possible link between COVID-19 infection and Parkinson’s disease, the researchers say.

If subsequently proven, this will be just another example of the brilliance and creative genius of Creationism's favourite sadist. Why use a creation like the SARS-CoV-2 virus to just kill people or make them sick for a few weeks, while ruining the world's economies and destroying businesses, when you can use the same virus to start a progressively debilitating disease developing in relatively young people and make them suffer for the rest of their lives, if they manage to survive the initial infection?

Creationist mode:

The grown-up science, of course, is not an attempt to show off the cleverness of a mythical magician in the sky but how much of a threat this virus could be, especially in its 'long covid' form. Showing yet again the importance of getting what protection against it medical science can currently offer - the vaccines, complete with the booster, and any regular (?annual) updates that might be required until the pandemic burns itself out and become just another annoying virus like those causing influenza and the common cold.

In other words, get boosted, as soon as possible and continue to excercise caution.

Reference:

Semerdzhiev, Slav A.; Fakhree, Mohammad A. A.; Segers-Nolten, Ine; Blum, Christian; Claessens, Mireille M. A. E.
Interactions between SARS-CoV-2 N-Protein and α-Synuclein Accelerate Amyloid Formation
ACS Chemical Neuroscience; (2021) DOI: 10.1021/acschemneuro.1c00666

The Long Slow Decline of Religion in USA is Continuing

About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated | Pew Research Center

The latest Pew Research survey reveals another huge fall in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian and another increase in the number self-identifying as 'None' or unaffiliated. At just 63% self-identifying as Christians, this is the second lowest since Pew began these surveys, down from 75% a decade ago and from 78% in 2007.

'Nones' have reached a new high at 29%.

As the next chart shows, all the decline has been at the expense of Protestant churches which have fallen by 12 percentage points since 2007 to just 40%, in other words, 6 out of 10 Americans now self-identify as non-Protestant, including 21% Catholic and about 3% Orthodox Christian or Mormon.

The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years, in other words, these churches which includes those who described themselves as 'just Christian' without identifying any particular church, have been losing about 1% of their share of the people per year.

Catholicism has fallen by only 3 percentage points since 2007 and has staged a small recovery compared to 3 years ago when it fell below 20%. It is now back to its 2014 share at 21%.

Malevolent Designer News - Another Piece of Brilliance by Creationism's Beloved Sadist

Female Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis, emerging from the foot of a victim.

Artwork: Catherine Webber-Hounslow,
The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good., p87.

Research news - Debilitating human parasite transmitted via dogs eating fish - University of Exeter

Creationist mode:

Until recently, it looked like scientists could be on the verge of eradicating another of the divine malevolence's nasty little parasites, like they did with smallpox and the disease in African cattle - Rinderpest.

This time, the disease was the disgusting parasitic worm, the Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis, which I described in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, p 87..

A person becomes infected with the Guinea worm when they drink water containing water fleas that are carrying the larval form of the worm. The water fleas are killed in the stomach, releasing the larvae which penetrate the stomach wall and enter the peritoneum. Here, male and female worms mature, pair up and mate. The male then dies but the female migrates to the subcutaneous tissues and grows to about 2 mm wide and up to a metre long. After 10-14 months she moves around in the subcutaneous tissues, often causing intense pain and eventually migrating to the lower leg or foot where she forms a painful, burning blister which can be relieved by immersion in water. When the foot is in water, the female emerges from the blister and begins to shed larvae which infect water fleas to begin the cycle again. The resulting wound may ulcerate and may become infected with opportunist bacteria such as tetanus. Secondary infections have necessitated limb amputations.

Guine worm being extracted

Source: CDC

So successful has the eradication campaign been that infections had fallen from about 3.5 million in 1986, in some of the poorest parts of the world, such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and South Sudan, to just 27 in 2020, all in Chad, and D. mediensis looked to be on the verge of extinction. A major part of this campaign was the simple expedient of filtering the water through cloth, which was enough to remove water fleas.

But, as any devotee of Creationism's putative creator god will tell you, the malevolence who creates these nasty little parasites with which to make its creation suffer, is often well ahead of the game in its battles with medical science, so, true to form, it has stepped in in the nick of time with a brilliant master-stroke which means it is much more difficult now to eradicate it.

Scientists working at the University of Exeter, UK, have discovered that the worm now infect domestic dogs, cats and maybe wild animals such as wild cats too. But it is not as simple as that. To get the worms into dogs and cats, it have adapted it so it lives in the digestive tract of fish inside the water fleas that they eat, which are then eaten by dogs and cats when human catch the fish and either throw them away or gut them before cooking them. Inside the mammalian digestive tract, the worm larvae are liberated from the water fleas, just like they are when ingested in drinking water by humans.

Guinea worm is now most widespread in Chad, where according to the CDC, 1,582 of the 1,625 (97.4%) worm infections detected worldwide were recorded in 2020. Of these, 1,507 (92.7%) were in domestic dogs, 61 in domestic cats, and 2 in wild felids, compared to only 12 in humans.

So feral and domestic animals are now acting as a reservoir of these worms, making it much more difficult to eradicate them because you just can't get cats and dogs to filter their drinking water.

Brilliant, eh? There's no stopping the divine malevolence once it decides to make life miserable for people, as it did with Africans and the Guinea worm. Africans seem to be its favourite victims judging by the number of these nasty parasites to be found there, especially in the tropical parts, what with these and other worms, mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, zika and yellow fever and sleeping sickness carried by tsetse flies, on top of the regular famines and malnutrition caused by drought and crop failures.

Creationist mode:

Now the science, rather than the childish superstition.

Dogs are now the key impediment to eradicating this dreadful human disease.

Our work shows that fisheries, and the facilitation of dogs eating fish, are likely contributing to the persistence of Guinea worm in Chad.

The challenge now is that this pathogen must be eliminated not only from people but also from animals.

This is a clear example of where a 'One Health' approach to integrating health of people, animals and the environment is required to eradicate this debilitating human disease.

Professor Robbie McDonald, Lead author
Environment and Sustainability Institute
University of Exeter, Penryn, Devon, UK

Here is how the Exeter University scientists made their discovery, as explained in the news release:

Targeted surveillance showed that in 2020, 93% of Guinea worms detected worldwide were in dogs in Chad, in central Africa.

Research by the University of Exeter, published today in Current Biology, has revealed a new pathway for transmission – by dogs eating fish that carry the parasite larvae. This means dogs maintain the parasite’s life-cycle and humans can still catch the disease.

The researchers worked for a year in several of the worst-affected villages along the River Chari in Chad.

They tracked hundreds of dogs with satellite tags to analyse movements, and revealed dog diets throughout the year using forensic stable isotope analysis of dog whiskers.

Much of the fish eaten by the dogs – usually guts or smaller fish – was discarded by humans fishing on the river and its lagoons.

In the abstract to their paper in Current Biology, the authors say:

Highlights

• Reservoirs of infection in dogs impede eradication of human Guinea worm disease.
• We analyzed disease risk in dogs in Chad where Guinea worm is most common.
• Disease is associated with consumption of fish made available by seasonal fisheries.
• Novel transmission pathway highlights value of One Health for disease eradication.

Summary
Exploitation of natural resources is a driver of human infectious disease emergence. The emergence of animal reservoirs of Guinea worm Dracunculus medinensis, particularly in domestic dogs Canis familiaris, has become the major impediment to global eradication of this human disease. 93% of all Guinea worms detected worldwide in 2020 were in dogs in Chad. Novel, non-classical pathways for transmission of Guinea worm in dogs, involving consumption of fish, have been hypothesized to support the maintenance of this animal reservoir. We quantified and analyzed variation in Guinea worm emergence in dogs in Chad, across three climatic seasons, in multiple villages and districts. We applied forensic stable isotope analyses to quantify dietary variation within and among dogs and GPS tracking to characterize their spatial ecology. At the end of the hot-dry season and beginning of the wet season, when fishing by people is most intensive, Guinea worm emergence rates in dogs were highest, dogs ate most fish, and fish consumption was most closely associated with disease. Consumption of fish by dogs enables a non-classical transmission pathway for Guinea worm in Chad. Seasonal fisheries and the facilitation of dogs eating fish are likely contributing to disease persistence and to this key impediment to human disease eradication. Interrelated natural resource use, climatic variation, companion animal ecology, and human health highlight the indispensability of One Health approaches to the challenges of eradicating Guinea worm and other zoonotic diseases.

Goodwin, Cecily E.D.; Léchenne, Monique; Wilson-Aggarwal, Jared K.; Koumetio, Sidouin Metinou; Swan, George J.F.; Moundai, Tchonfienet; Ozella, Laura; McDonald, Robbie A. Seasonal fishery facilitates a novel transmission pathway in an emerging animal reservoir of Guinea worm
Current Biology 2021; Volume 0, Issue 0; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.11.050

The thing is, there are so many of these examples of how, if there really were an intelligent designer with the characteristics Creationists like to attribute to their favourite god - omniscience and omnipotence - it could only be described as a malevolent sadist as well as an incompetent designer. I certainly found enough to fill a book with and could probably write another if it wasn't simpley making the same point again. What other reason could there be for changing the MO of the Guinea worm so it can avoid being eradicated by medical science?

This is, of course, why you can never get an ID advocate to discuss parasites and parasitism, other than to blame their mythical first pair, Adam and Eve as though 'sin' itself is a sentient, creative entity capable of designing things like the Guinea worm, the SARS-CoV-2 virus and childhood cancers. Certainly, none of it make any sense as the work of an intelligent, omniscient, omni-benevolent designer.

It is, of course, entirely explained as the result of an unplanned, mindless and so amoral, process involving nothing more than chemistry and physics and the inevitable result of natural selection acting on random variations in a population. For some inexplicable reason though, Creationists would rather present their god as an evil monster rather than accept the demonstrable and observable fact of evolution.

Malevolent Designer News - It Looks Like The Divine Malevolence Could Have a Major Win with Omicron

Images of the Delta and Omicron variants from the Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome, showing mutations compared to the original SARS CoV-2 spike

© Laurence SAUBADU

Vaccines and previous infection could offer some “stronger than basic” protection to Omicron, early study suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

An early study by a Chinese research group could show that the ο variant of the SARS-Cov-2 virus could be something of a victory for Creationism's divine malevolence in its battle with medical science to ensure as many people as possible get sick and die from its coronavirus. The major finding of the study is that the neutralising capacity of antibodies produced by infection with the reference strain (D614G) is reduced 8.4 fold for Omicron, compared to only 1.2-4.5 fold decrease for earlier variant of concern, such as Alpha and Delta, and other variants of interest.

The study shows that vaccines, and previous infections offer some "stronger then basic" protection against Omicron but are by no means a complete protection against it and that even a third (booster) vaccination, while significantly increasing antibody levels, might not be sufficient to prevent significant illness, because the variant has 'significant capacity to evade [antibody] protection'. Their findings are published in the open access Taylor & Francis online journal, Emerging Microbes & Infections.

The team conducted serological tests using serum from 28 patients recovering from infection by the original (D614G) strain. According to information supplied by Taylor & Francis:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Intelligently Designed Childhood Cancers

Preparing the tumour for sequencing.

© Charité | Linda Ambrosius

Tumor evolution: Study on genetic changes in neuroblastoma | Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Creationist mode:

When cells within a single tumour differ in terms of their genetic makeup, this is referred to as intratumour heterogeneity. Researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) have been able to reconstruct the process by which this genetic heterogeneity develops in neuroblastoma, a type of cancer which primarily affects young children. According to their findings, the genetic makeup of individual tumours shows marked spatial and temporal variability. Results from this study have been published in Nature Communications.

The brilliance of this design is only just being appreciated by medical science since it makes it very difficult to treat and control the growth of these malignant cancers which are especially common in young children, accounting for 15% of cancer-related child deaths. It enables the tumour to quickly evolve to escape any drug therapies because these don't work against all the cell variations in the tumour, enabling some to survive the treatment and grow back. It also means some of the cells can break off from the original tumour and migrate to other parts of the body to start new tumours which will also carry this ability to evade treatment with them.

According to information provided by Charité and MDC in their press release:

Unintelligent Design News - What on Earth is This Complex System For?

Lizard beetles, Doubledaya bucculenta, plant a fungal garden inside dead bamboo stems to feed developing larvae.

Credit: Wataru Toki

Nagoya University Research Achievements

The thing about good design is that the thing designed should have a clear purpose. Simply making things that don't do anything except make copies of themselves is not the act of an intelligent designer, and there are some complex systems and processes in nature that should leave any intelligent [sic] design advocate scratching their head and wondering what on Earth the purpose of this is and why does it need to be so complicated?

Of course, nothing in the living world has any ultimate purpose other than making copies of itself (which is just one of the ways we know it isn't intelligently designed). So, Creationists go on to make up all manner of reasons, or assert that it's not given to us to understand the purpose of their putative magic creator, which illustrates the utter uselessness of ID as an alternative scientific hypothesis!

So it would be interesting to hear what Creationists think the purpose of this fungus-farming beetle and its bizarre reproductive system is for, and why it needs to be so complicated?

Briefly, Japanese Lizard beetles, Doubledaya bucculenta, farm yeast inside bamboo stems for their developing larvae to eat. The larvae feed on yeast injected from their mothers' abdomens into the bamboo stems they are growing in. The female beetle has a special structure in her abdomen in which to keep the fungus, which she then injects into dead bamboo shoots along with her eggs. The bamboo supplies the fungus (a type of yeast, Wickerhamomyces anomalus) with nutrients and the growing beetle larvae eat the fungus.

Now, that might seem like a sensible arrangement as the beetle larvae live safe inside the hard bamboo and get a self-renewing food supply and the fungus gets somewhere safe in which to live and reproduce, albeit at a cost. However, two Japanese scientists from Nagoya University have made a surprising discovery. Unlike most fungal-insect symbiotic relationships where the fungus breaks down large and otherwise indigestible polysaccharide molecules such as the cellulose and lignin of which the bamboo is composed, W. anomalus digests small molecules such as glucose and fructose, which the beetle larvae could do for themselves.

This was a real surprise. While yeast can indeed decompose those indigestible components, our analysis shows the yeast actually grows on small molecule monosaccharides.

Bamboo is not only a farm for the yeast but also a house for the larvae. So the larvae can live in a strong house safely because the house is not decomposed by the food.

Wataru Toki.
Graduate School of Bioagricultural Sciences
Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

And that's not all. The same scientists also found that the fungus could digest cellulose, etc, since it has the necessary enzymes, but does not do so.

What the scientists propose is that this evolved to prevent the fungus from digesting the bamboo which protects both it and the beetle larvae, the adults of which it needs to perpetuate itself.

So, we have a fungus provided for the larvae to eat, but they do so by digesting the same sugars that the larvae could digest themselves without all the intermediate machinery the fungus uses, and this is all to prevent the yeast digesting the plant it and the larvae are housed in. Any sane designer who ended up with a beetle needing somewhere safe to lay its eggs, so its larvae were protected and fed, would have just created the larvae to eat the glucose and fructose the fungus eats and cut out the middleman. The larvae's inability to digest the structural polysaccharides would have prevent it from destroying its protective housing.

And that would be assuming there was some purpose for these beetles beyond making more lizard beetles.

The scientist's findings were published in Scientific Reports last September:

Abstract
Symbiotic fungi of wood-inhabiting insects are often considered to aid wood digestion of host insects when the associated fungi can assimilate wood-associated indigestible materials. In most cases, however, the components of wood that are utilized by fungal symbionts remain poorly understood. The lizard beetle Doubledaya bucculenta (Coleoptera, Erotylidae, Languriinae) farms the symbiotic yeast Wickerhamomyces anomalus inside the cavity of host bamboo internodes, which serves as food for larvae. To determine the carbon sources of the internodes serving as nutritional substrates for W. anomalus, we used ion exchange chromatography measurements to analyze free and structural sugar compositions in fresh pith (FP), yeast-cultured pith (YP), and larva-reared pith (LP) of internodes. Glucose and fructose were the major free sugars in FP and markedly decreased in YP and LP. For structural sugars, no sugar significantly decreased in YP or LP compared with FP. Carbon assimilation tests showed that W. anomalus assimilated glucose, mannose, fructose, and sucrose strongly, xylose and cellobiose moderately, and xylan weakly. Elemental analysis revealed that the compositions of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen were not significantly different among tissue types. These results suggest that W. anomalus does not consume bamboo-associated indigestible sugars but most free sugars, mainly glucose and fructose, in the pith. Our findings suggest that a symbiont’s abilities may not always benefit its host in nature.

Toki, W., Aoki, D.
Nutritional resources of the yeast symbiont cultivated by the lizard beetle Doubledaya bucculenta in bamboos.
Scientific Reports 11, 19208 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-98733-y

Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It would be hard to think of a better example of a system which violates all the principle of good design. Firstly we have no clear purpose; secondly, we have needless complexity and thirdly, we have prolific waste in that an intermediate of that complexity in the larvae’s food chain is inevitably wasteful and many more beetles could be produced without it.

And then, of course, the inexplicable stupidity of using a fungus with all the enzymes needed to digest cellulose, then not using them because doing so would destroy the entire system!
There are very many more of these examples in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, but few of them are so starkly examples of the sort of stupidity in design that can only come from an unintelligent, undirected, mindless, natural process such as evolution by natural selection, so it is hard to think of a system which doesn't refute the notion of intelligent design quite so comprehensively.

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link