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'

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

F770W–F277W–F115W shown as an RGB false-colour mosaic
at redshift $z=14.32_{-0.20}^{+0.08}$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.

What information do you have on the evidence for the evolution of land plants and their divergence from marine algae? The evolution of land plants from their algal ancestors is one of the most significant transitions in Earth's history. Multiple lines of evidence, including molecular phylogenetics, comparative genomics, palaeobotany, and developmental biology, support the hypothesis that land plants (embryophytes) evolved from a group of green algae, specifically within the Charophyte clade. Below is a summary of the key evidence:

1. Molecular and Phylogenetic Evidence
   • Shared Genetic Markers: Molecular phylogenetic studies show that land plants are most closely related to charophyte algae, such as Chara and Klebsormidium.
   • Chloroplast DNA Similarities: Land plants and charophytes share specific gene arrangements in their chloroplast DNA, supporting common ancestry.
   • Cellulose Synthase Genes: The enzyme responsible for cellulose biosynthesis (CesA) has similar genetic sequences in charophytes and land plants.
   • Regulatory Genes: Some transcription factors crucial for land plant development, such as KNOX and BELL genes, have homologs in charophyte algae.
2. Morphological and Structural Evidence
   • Cell Division Similarities: Charophyte algae and land plants share a phragmoplast-based cell division mechanism, distinct from other algal groups.
   • Sporopollenin Protection: Spores of early land plants and some charophytes are encased in sporopollenin, a tough biopolymer that protects against desiccation.
   • Plasmodesmata: Both groups have plasmodesmata, cell-to-cell communication channels that enable coordinated growth.
   • Branching Growth: Some charophyte algae, such as Coleochaete, show apical growth similar to land plants.
3. Fossil Evidence
   • Ordovician and Silurian Microfossils (470-440 Ma): Fossilized spores with sporopollenin coatings appear before macroscopic land plant fossils, indicating early adaptation to terrestrial environments.
   • Rhynie Chert (Early Devonian, ~407 Ma): Preserves some of the earliest land plants (Rhynia, Aglaophyton), showing vascular tissue development.
   • Cooksonia (Silurian-Devonian Transition, ~430-410 Ma): One of the earliest known vascular plants, showing transition from bryophyte-like ancestors to tracheophytes.
4. Biochemical and Physiological Adaptations
   • Desiccation Tolerance: Early land plants and some charophytes can survive drying out, an adaptation to terrestrial life.
   • Hormonal Pathways: Land plants and charophytes use similar hormones, such as auxin and abscisic acid, for growth and stress response.
   • Symbiosis with Fungi: Fossil evidence and molecular studies suggest that early land plants formed mutualistic associations with mycorrhizal fungi (Glomeromycota) to obtain nutrients.
5. Transitional Forms
   • Zygnematophyceae as a Key Group: Recent genomic studies suggest that the Zygnematophyceae, a subgroup of charophyte algae, are the closest relatives of land plants. These algae lack complex multicellularity but share stress tolerance genes with land plants.
   • From Simple Algae to Complex Embryophytes: Gradual increase in structural complexity, from filamentous and parenchymatous algae to early non-vascular land plants, suggests a stepwise transition to terrestrial life.

Conclusion

The divergence of land plants from marine algae is well-supported by multiple independent lines of evidence. The transition was driven by adaptations to terrestrial challenges such as desiccation, nutrient acquisition, and reproduction. The evolutionary path likely involved early colonization by freshwater charophyte algae, which evolved desiccation tolerance, protective spores, and symbiotic relationships that facilitated the transition to permanent land-based life.

Now a team of researchers from Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany, led by Professor Jan de Vries, Göttingen University, who led the research, explains: has shown that this same 'hub' is present in both mosses and algae, even though they diverged 600 million years ago, the mosses having evolved out of simple algae.

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.

The Bible's Bad Science - What The Bronze Age Pastoralists Could Never Have Guessed At

Andromeda

By Adam Evans. Uploaded by NotFromUtrecht,CC BY 2.0, Link

Andromeda

By Kanwar Singh - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

NASA's Hubble Provides Bird's-Eye View of Andromeda Galaxy's Ecosystem - NASA Science

Q. How do we know the Bible could not possibly have been written by the god described in it?

A. The Bible describes the god it purports to have been inspired by as all-knowing, yet there is a great deal the Bible gets wrong, and even more that is left out. Clearly, whoever wrote it was ignorant of a great deal and almost all of what little they thought they knew they got hopelessly wrong.

For example, the opening few verses of Genesis make it plain that the authors thought the Universe consisted of a small, flat planet, on which they and everything they knew about lived. This planet had a dome over it from which the sun and moon were hung and in which the stars were embedded. The Bible even described how these stars could be shaken loose during earthquakes whereupon they would fall down to Earth.

This description of the universe bears no resemblance to the real universe and is clearly a description of what someone standing on a hill in Canaan thought his universe consisted of. It could scarcely be further from the truth.

There is simply no reason for an omniscient god to have got it so wrong; it's not even of the category of a 'lie to children', like the planetary model of an atom, designed to foster understanding of some of the properties of atoms without the complication of having to understand some quantum physics. The small, flat planet with a dome over it at the centre of the universe provides nothing by way of a useful model with which we can explain observed phenomena.

It is wrong, plainly and simply, and as such has served throughout the centuries to confuse and mislead, to endarken rather than to enlighten us.

Bible Blunder - How Can Anyone Imagine Tales Like The Tower of Babel Are Real History?

The Tower of Babel as imagined by
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526-1569)

Wikipedia - Originally from Google Art Project.
Public Domain, Link

Street children in Accra, Ghana, often speak multiple languages fluently.

How many languages can you learn at the same time? – Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages - University of Potsdam

Along with nonsense like the Jonah tale and the Exodus myth, the Tower of Babel story must rate as amongst the more ridiculous stories to have been bound up in a single book later declared to be the literal truth as revealed by a creator god.

These nonsense stories refute any notion of omniscient involvement in their telling. They were made up by people with minimal understanding of the subject about which they were writing, so, not surprisingly, they are unravelling as we discover more and see the magnitude of their errors and misunderstanding.

But the nonsense of the Tower of Babel tale should have been apparent to even the Bronze Age mythmakers who made it up as a simplistic attempt to explain the handful of different languages they were aware of, from their limited view of the world which saw everything within a few days walk of the Canaanite Hills as comprising the whole Earth.

That the story was poorly grafted onto other mythologies becomes apparent when you read the immediately preceding chapter, which explained how the descendants of the sons of Noah all spoke different languages, as though that were even remotely likely. Imaging your own family where you and your cousins and your and their children all speak different languages! Apparently, the authors of Genesis had no problem believing that was at all likely.

So, they concocted the following:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations… (Genesis 10:1-5)

These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations… (Genesis 10:20)

These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.(Genesis 10:31-32)

So, a whole chapter devoted to why there are so many different languages by constructing an unlikely family tree with each son in each generation speaking different languages. Unlikely though that silly tale is, we turn the page, and what do we see?

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. (Genesis 11:1)

Unintelligent Design - Flightless Birds Still Have Feathers for Flight

The extinct "elephant bird" of Madagascar.

Photo: Brian Choo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failing Christianity - Decline in Faith Has Stalled in USA But is Set To Plunge Again

US Christian Decline May Be Stabilizing: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study | Pew Research Center

It's mixed news from the USA which had looked as though it was following Europe, albeit a generation behind, in rejecting religion and becoming a substantially secular society with non-believers and non-affiliated 'spiritual' people in the clear majority. Even formerly strongly Catholic countries such as Spain and Ireland have experienced a massive haemorrhage of members since the clerical child sexual abuse scandals of recent decades broke.

Refuting Creationism - How The Ice Giants Created Complex Life In The Oceans

Glacial grooves stemming from the Wisconsin glaciation at Kelleys Island, Ohio

By Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Giant ice bulldozers: how ancient glaciers helped life evolve - News at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth, Australia

It's generally recognised that complex, multicellular life began in the oceans from colonies of single-celled organisms, but what isn't known is what environmental triggers promoted the evolution of this complexity.

Now researchers from Curtin University, Perth, Australia, in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, believe they have shown a correlation between this event, or series of events and the melting of vast ice sheets which covered Earth in a period known as snowball Earth. The trigger was not so much the melt-water and rise in sea levels as the minerals this melt-water brought with it. This sudden abundance of minerals was the result of the slow grinding of Earth's surface by giant glaciers as they gouged their way across the planet.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals Evolved By Loss of Genetic Information

Life appearance reconstruction of a Neanderthal male at the Natural History Museum of London.

Photo: Allan Henderson under CC BY 2.0.

Fig. 1: Summary of individuals included in the analyses.

a The geographical and chronological range of the Neanderthal clade individuals and modern humans included in the analysis. The symbols correspond to the n of individuals from each site and are colored as follows: blue = Sima de los Huesos; purple = Krapina; green = late Neanderthals; orange = modern humans. Orange ellipses correspond to the approximated geographical range of the extant modern human assemblage. Age estimates of fossil specimens are provided in Table 1. Background satellite image was downloaded from © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap, © Maxar and rescaled to fit to figure panel size. b–e Three-dimensional models of the left semicircular canal and vestibule of selected individuals for the four groups considered in the present study.

The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin

Creationists will confidently tell you that a loss of genetic information is invariably fatal so can play no part in evolution. They believe this because the frauds at the Discovery Institute have misled them into believing that every piece if DNA and therefore every piece of genetic information has a purpose.

And yet researchers have shown that it was a loss of genetic information following a population bottleneck that gave rise to the classic Neanderthals as a distinct species from their pre-Neanderthal ancestors.

This was the conclusion from a study led by Alessandro Urciuoli (Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Mercedes Conde-Valverde (Cátedra de Otoacústica Evolutiva de HM Hospitales y la Universidad de Alcalá), researchers measured the morphological diversity in the structure of the inner ear responsible for our sense of balance: the semicircular canals.

Malevolent Designer - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Ensured Its Zika Virus Infects Developing Babies

Zika virus's non-structural protein NS1 (red) and mitochondria (green) travel through the tunneling nanotube (TNT, gray) from infected to uninfected placental cells.

Image: Mysorekar lab.

A representation of the surface of the Zika virus, with protruding envelope glycoproteins shown in red.

Kuhn and Rossmann research groups, Purdue University

Stealth virus: Zika virus builds tunnels to covertly infect cells of the placenta | BCM

I've written recently about the lengths creationism's divine malevolence must have gone to to ensure one of its nasty little parasitic pathogens, the zika virus, gets to infect as many of its potential victims as possible. Science has now revealed how it then ensures as many babies being carried by its pregnant victims as possible are infected, by sneaking past the maternal/foetal barrier in the placenta.

Zika, is, of course, the mosquito-borne virus that causes microcephaly and associated mental handicap in babies whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.

To ensure the success of this method of increasing the suffering in the world, the designer had a major problem of its own making to overcome - it had given the human foetus a placenta that included a barrier between its circulation and that of the mother. This barrier is normally sufficient to prevent viruses crossing over into the developing foetus, so clearly, if an many children with microcephaly as possible are born, the designer had to find a way to bypass this barrier.

It produced the ingenious method of creating microtubules (small tunnels) between the mother's cells and the foetus's cells in the placenta and simply passing through them!

Unusually for creationism's divine malevolence, which normally behaves like a mindless evolutionary process and reinvents a novel solution for the same problem encountered by a different species, this is the same sneaky method used by a few other viruses to pass from cell to cell in a sheet of tissue, without going outside and making themselves available for the immune system to detect and respond to.

Refuting Creationism - A Simple Mutation Could Have Given Us the Power of Speech.

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Expression pattern of NOVA1 in the brain of a mouse. NOVA1 in green, nuclei (DAPI) in blue.

Darnell lab.

Model of the evolutionary timing for the 197th amino acid change in the NOVA1 gene, noting the Nova1^hu/hu mice generated in this study. Nova1^hu/hu mice express the modern human-specific amino acid in the NOVA1 protein. The bottom panel shows the corresponding position within the KH2 domain of the NOVA1 protein. Amino acids structurally proximal (<5 Å) to the 197th amino acid, as predicted by AlphaFold2, are highlighted in pink.

Tajima, Y., Vargas, C.D.M., Ito, K. et al (2024) (CC BY 4.0)

The Rockefeller University » A single protein may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language

In the simplistic creationist parody of evolution, intelligently designed to make cult members feel superior to real scientists, the evolution of something like speech in humans must have involved complex, specified, information, that humans alone have that other, lesser, species don't have. Of course, this could only be the result of intelligent design by a supreme intelligence who favours humans, its special creation, who can be whichever your favourite deity is, although it’s not religion because it doesn’t mention God or the Bible. Got it!

The surprising thing is that neither William A. Dembski, nor Michael J. Behe, leading Deception Institute fellows, have written a widely acclaimed (in creationist circles and in selected magazine and newspaper articles emanating from the Deception Institute, for its brilliant conclusive proof of the failure of 'Darwinism') book, detailing the sheer astounding complexity of the genetic basis for human speech, and how this proves we don't share a common ancestor with the African apes.

Perhaps they were aware already of the fact that the genetic basis for human speech involves, no such complexity, but just a single point mutation in a gene we share with the other apes and many other mammals.

Rather than proof of human exceptionalism, our ability to speak turns out to be evidence for common ancestry.

The mutation was discovered by researchers from The Rockefeller University and is a simple substitution of the amino acid isoleucine for valine, in the protein NOVA1 which resulted from the substitution of guanine (G) in the first position in the codon for isoleucine for adenine (A). So, the simplest of all mutations - a single point substitution of one nucleotide for another in a gene, may have enabled humans to speak.

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus Makes Its Host Destroy Its Own Brain

Beauveria bassiana on unidentified insect.

© Lisa Bennett (CC-BY 4.0)

Fungus ‘hacks’ natural immune system causing neurodegeneration in fruit flies - University of Birmingham

If we are to believe creationists, their god created insects such as fruit flies, Colorado beetles, etc., and then set about devising ways to kill them with, amongst other pathogens, fungi that infect them and destroy them from inside.

One of the problems this supposedly intelligent designer had to overcome was the immune system it had given the insects in order to protect them from the pathogens it was designing to kill them.

According to an open access paper just published in PLOS Biology by a team led by Professor Alicia Hidalgo from School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, one species of parasitic fungus, Beauveria bassiana, cleverly turns its host's immune system against its host, making it destroy its own brain. Although this fungus does not affect mammals, so poses no threat to humans, the team warns that it is possible that another fungus could use a similar technique against mammals, including humans.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Are Questioning Human Evolution - But Not In The Way Creationists Had Hoped

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A new model upends the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event and suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. The team of researchers said the new interpretation of humanity’s origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Credit: NASA. All Rights Reserved.

Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we’re not alone | Penn State University

An interdisciplinary team of astrophysicists and geoscientists has questioned the evolution of a human-like intelligent species. But the question is not about whether, as creationists have been predicting for 50 plus years, but just how easy or difficult was it? That we evolved was never in any doubt.

The relevance of the easy/difficult question is that it affects our calculation of the probability of similar intelligent life evolving on other planets. If each step in its evolution was hard (the 'hard step' model), then we may be alone in the Universe; if easy, then the Universe could be teeming with life.