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.

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Intelligent Design Hoax News - How an 'Irreducibly Complex' System Evolved

Rove Beetle, Staphylinidae sp.

A beetle chemical defense gland offers clues about how complex organs evolve -- ScienceDaily

Rove beetles are a widespread family of beetles, comprising some 64,000 different, soil and leaf-litter dwelling species, many of which have interesting defensive organs for producing noxious chemicals that would normally have an unscrupulous Creationist fraud jumping up and down with glee - they appear to be irreducibly complex in that all components need to be present for the system to work.

What Creationist frauds, presented with these systems, do, is declare that such a system could not have evolved by Darwinian evolution which depends on an accumulation of small differences each of which conveys a benefit, since the entire evolutionary process would need to complete before any benefit became apparent. They then declare it to have been intelligently designed as is, by magic, because the probability of it arising as is, by chance in a single evolutionary event, is so low as to be indistinguishable from zero. The entire Intelligent [sic] Design industry is founded on just such a spurious argument, coupled with the implied false-dichotomy fallacy that if science can't explain something, "God did it!".

Evolution News - And Then There Was One

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Common arctic finches are all the same species | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | University of Colorado Boulder

The Redpoll is a Holarctic finch which makes occasional forays south, so, while never a common bird outside its normal range, it is a favourite of birdwatchers and ornithologists. The problem was that the range of morphologies within a species, with considerable overlap, made it very difficult to distinguish between then in the field, so birdwatchers were never sure which species or subspecies they had actually seen or whether they were really different species or subspecies.

Now, work by researchers from University of Colorado, Boulder, has finally settled the question about their taxonomic status. Detailed DNA analysis has shown that they are in fact the same species, which is highly variable due to the control of a 'supergene' which produces a range of different morphologies - the usual basis for taxonomic classification prior to the technology which enables DNA to be analysed in sufficient detail.

Unintelligent Designer News - Another Stupid Arms Race Discovered

Highly venomous Cape cobra, Naja nivea, in threat posture

Source: Times Newspapers
Photo: Willem van Zyl

Primates vs cobras: how our last common ancestor built venom resistance - UQ News - The University of Queensland, Australia

A team of researchers from Queensland University, Australia, and Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, led by Associate Professor Bryan Fry, has discovered evidence of an evolutionary arms race between Afro-Asian primates and venomous snakes, especially the cobras, which has given us an increased resistance to the neurotoxin in cobra venom, compared to other mammals and the primates of Madagascar where there are no venomous snakes and South America where venomous snakes are usually small, nocturnal and burrowing.

In doing so, they have also produced yet more evidence of the evolutionary relationship between the other African apes and Homo sapiens, who together form the Hominidae clade, sharing a common ancestor in which this resistance is thought to have evolved. In members of this clade, the resistance is especially marked, though not complete since cobra venom can still kill us.

As primates from Africa gained the ability to walk upright and dispersed throughout Asia, they developed weapons to defend themselves against venomous snakes, this likely sparked an evolutionary arms race and evolving this venom resistance.

This was just one of many evolutionary defences – many primate groups appear to also have developed excellent eyesight, which is thought to have aided them in detecting and defending themselves against venomous snakes.
But Madagascan Lemurs and Central and South American monkeys, which live in regions that haven’t been colonised by or come in close contact with neurotoxic venomous snakes, didn’t evolve this kind of resistance to snake venoms and have poorer eyesight.
It’s been long-theorised that snakes have strongly influenced primate evolution, but we now have additional biological evidence to support this theory.

Richard Harris, lead-author
PhD candidate
Venom Evolution Lab
University of Queensland
Biological Sciences, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia

Our movement down from the trees and more commonly on land meant more interactions with venomous snakes, thus driving the evolutionary selection of this increased resistance.

It is important to note that this resistance is not absolute – we are not immune to cobra venom, just much less likely to die than other primates.

We have shown in other studies that resistance to snake venoms comes with what’s known as a fitness disadvantage, whereby the receptors don’t do their normal function as efficiently, so there is a fine balance to be struck where the gain has to outweigh the loss.

In this case, partial resistance was enough to gain the evolutionary advantage, but without the fitness disadvantage being too taxing.

We are increasingly recognising the importance snakes have played in the evolution of primates, including the way our brain is structured, aspects of language and even tool use.

This work reveals yet another piece in the puzzle of this complex arms race between snakes and primates.

Associate Professor, Dr. Bryan Fry, team leader and supervising author
Venom Evolution Lab
University of Queensland
Biological Sciences, St. Lucia, Brisbane, Australia

According the Queensland University News:

The team studied various snake toxin interactions with synthetic nerve receptors, comparing those of primates from Africa and Asia with those from Madagascar – which doesn’t have venomous snakes – and those from the Americas – where the cobra-related coral snakes are small, nocturnal and burrowing. Team leader Associate Professor Bryan Fry said the study also revealed that in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans, this resistance was sharply increased.

One of the problems to be overcome as a species evolves resistance to a neurotoxic venom, stems from the way these venoms work. In the case of cobra venom it contains α-neurotoxins which target nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, binding to them, so blocking these essential metabolic pathways. Any changes which modify these receptors, so making the α-neurotoxins less effective, will also reduce the efficiency of the pathway of which these receptors are a part, so there is an inevitable evolutionary trade-off between this cost and any benefits from increased resistance.

A similar phenomenon is involved in the evolutionary arms race between Garter snakes and rough-skinned newts, only in this case it is a snake evolving resistance to a toxin produced by a potential prey species. I used this as an example of any creator of this system indulging stupidly in an arms race with itself, in my book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

We see this same stupidity in the arms race between the primates and cobras, reaching its peak in the Hominidae.

The teams report is published open access in BMC Biology:

Abstract

Background
Snakes and primates have a multi-layered coevolutionary history as predators, prey, and competitors with each other. Previous work has explored the Snake Detection Theory (SDT), which focuses on the role of snakes as predators of primates and argues that snakes have exerted a selection pressure for the origin of primates’ visual systems, a trait that sets primates apart from other mammals. However, primates also attack and kill snakes and so snakes must simultaneously avoid primates. This factor has been recently highlighted in regard to the movement of hominins into new geographic ranges potentially exerting a selection pressure leading to the evolution of spitting in cobras on three independent occasions.

Results
Here, we provide further evidence of coevolution between primates and snakes, whereby through frequent encounters and reciprocal antagonism with large, diurnally active neurotoxic elapid snakes, Afro-Asian primates have evolved an increased resistance to α-neurotoxins, which are toxins that target the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. In contrast, such resistance is not found in Lemuriformes in Madagascar, where venomous snakes are absent, or in Platyrrhini in the Americas, where encounters with neurotoxic elapids are unlikely since they are relatively small, fossorial, and nocturnal. Within the Afro-Asian primates, the increased resistance toward the neurotoxins was significantly amplified in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans (clade Homininae). Comparative testing of venoms from Afro-Asian and American elapid snakes revealed an increase in α-neurotoxin resistance across Afro-Asian primates, which was likely selected against cobra venoms. Through structure-activity studies using native and mutant mimotopes of the α-1 nAChR receptor orthosteric site (loop C), we identified the specific amino acids responsible for conferring this increased level of resistance in hominine primates to the α-neurotoxins in cobra venom.

Conclusion
We have discovered a pattern of primate susceptibility toward α-neurotoxins that supports the theory of a reciprocal coevolutionary arms-race between venomous snakes and primates.

Harris, R.J., Nekaris, K.AI. & Fry, B.G.
Monkeying around with venom: an increased resistance to α-neurotoxins supports an evolutionary arms race between Afro-Asian primates and sympatric cobras.
BMC Biol 19, 253 (2021). DOI: 10.1186/s12915-021-01195-x

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

It is facts like this that expose Intelligent [sic] Design as a hoax aimed at scientifically illiterate fools who will remain wilfully ignorant of the very many arms races in nature which are one of the main drivers in evolution. Nothing that could conceivably be described as intelligent would indulge in a competitive arms race with itself and nothing that could be described as omni-benevolent would create the predator-prey and parasite-host relationships which give rise to these arms races in the first place.

On the other hand, evolutionary arms races are the inevitable, and entirely predictable, result of mindless, unplanned, evolution by natural selection.

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Malevolent Designer News - Another Inexplicable Arms Race to Protect Us AND Keep Making Us Sick!

As hunter-gatherer cultures began to eat more ruminants, they encountered anthrax more regularly than their primate ancestors.

Image credit: Abubakar Balogun/Provided

Anthrax arms race helped Europeans evolve against disease | Cornell Chronicle

Creationist mode:

When Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer created the anthrax bacteria, the purpose was to create an organism that would lay dormant in the soil for tens or hundreds of years and then, when eaten by a grazing animal such as sheep or cattle, it would produce a toxin which killed the unfortunate animal, so it's body could rot and produce millions more spores to lay dormant in the soil and so repeat the cycle endlessly. We know this because this is the result and an omniscient, omnipotent creator must know what the result of its creations will be, so creates them for that purpose and that purpose only.

Also, part of this intended outcome was that, as human culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists with domesticated animals, humans too would catch anthrax from their domestic animals and die from the toxins the bacteria produce in their bodies. Humans were intended to catch anthrax by eating their cattle while their cattle caught it by grazing on anthrax-contaminated pastures.

Now researchers at Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine have discovered that Creationism's intelligent [sic] designer then went in for something it frequently does with the nasty little parasites it creates to kill us with - it started to have an arms race with itself to protect us from the bacteria it had created to harm us with, then by modifying the bacteria so they could overcome the defences if was giving us - just as today it is creating new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 so it can continue to make us sick despite the vaccines humans have created to defend themselves with.

Creationist mode:

At least, that, if they follow the logic of their Creationist dogmas, is how Creationists have to view the relationship between anthrax and humans and other animals.

Evolution News - How Denisovans Helped Han Chinese Live the High-Life

The Tibetan Plateau where the research took place.

Photo credit: Peiqi Zhang/UC Davis

Denisovans or Homo Sapiens: Who Were the First to Settle (Permanently) on the Tibetan Plateau? | UC Davis

The story from human evolution of how the inhabitants of the Tibetan plateau acquired the ability to live permanently at such a high altitude just got a lot more interesting.

Once it was thought to be an example of very rapid evolution under intense selection pressure as a band of Han Chinese migrated to the Tibetan Plateau where the low oxygen pressure over a prolonged period would make them sick, and reduce their fertility with a very high rate of foetal death. Today, Han Chines living in Tibet have an infant mortality rate three times that of Tibetans. This intense selection pressure was believed to have favoured the evolution of the Endothelial Pas1 (EPAS1) gene which, in living populations, is known to improve oxygen transport in the blood. Most modern Tibetans carry a high frequency of the EPAS1 gene.

Tibetan woman

It also favoured the evolution of genes which reduce the tendency of the body to react to a low oxygen pressure by making more red blood cell, so making the blood thicker and causing blood pressure to increase - the cause of altitude sickness. This is normally the result of the kidneys being deprived of oxygen so secreting the hormone, haemopoietin, which stimulates red blood cell production (after severe blood loss, for example). The presence of the EPAS1 gene means that no such increase in red blood cells is necessary because it increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of haemoglobin.

But that rapid evolution hypothesis, delicious though it was, was before the DNA, extracted from a finger bone found in a the Denisova cave in Siberia was sequenced and found to contain the same gene. Their gene and that of the Tibetans are so similar that almost identical genes evolving twice in two different hominins is highly improbable. There was little doubt that the Han Chinese who migrated to Tibet had acquired the gene from Denisovans.

It was also believed that this migration had been very recent in geological terms. The question then became, how did these migrants acquire this Denisovan gene, which is absent in the Han who stayed put? It was thought unlikely that they acquired it directly from Denisovans since interbreeding was believed to pre-date the split from the Han. It was proposed that they acquired it from South Asian people such as the Nepalese. South Asian people carry a large proportion of Denisovan DNA, acquired by earlier periods of interbreeding.

Covidiot GOP Representative, Marjorie Taylor Green, Sets a New Low in Ignorant Stupidity

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, GOP Georgia, seen here implying that face-masks inhibit free speech, compared non-contagious cancer to highly contagious COVID-19 in what could rank as the most stupid tweet by a senior GOP Trumpanzee to date.

Loony Trumpanzee Loyalist, Marjorie Taylor Green, Compares COVID-19 to Cancer.

In what could rank as one of the most stupidly ignorant and dangerous tweets by a senior Trumpanzee, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R- Georgia) implied that COVID-19 is no more contagious than cancer. And, as though to prove it wasn't a mistake, promptly followed it up with a second tweet which made the same idiotic comparison.

She clearly has missed the widely available information about new variants such as δ which gave rise to the massive surge of cases starting in autumn, 2020 and now the ο variant currently causing yet another wave of infections, especially amongst the unvaccinated.

Why Do Creationists Choose to Remain Ignorant of Science? A New Study Offers An Explanation.

Whether people inform themselves or remain ignorant is due to three factors | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

One thing about Creationists and religious fundamentalist, that most rationalists and scientifically minded people find infuriating and almost incomprehensible is why they appear to be so well-informed about their chosen beliefs but remain so ignorant of anything that might contradict them.

For example, some Creationists and/or religious apologists will be well versed in the fallacies and disinformation that pass for arguments for their beliefs, yet, despite being told ad nauseum that that is not what scientists claim, or a patient

Vast amounts of information are now available to individuals. This includes everything from information about your genetic make-up to information about social issues and the economy. We wanted to find out: how do people decide what they want to know? And why do some people actively seek out information, for example about COVID vaccines, financial inequality and climate change, and others don’t?

The information people decide to expose themselves to has important consequences for their health, finance and relationships. By better understanding why people choose to get informed, we could develop ways to convince people to educate themselves.

Professor Tali Sharot, co-lead author
UCL Psychology & Language Sciences<br> And Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research

explanation of how that particular apologetic can be easily refuted, they display complete ignorance of those counter arguments and of the facts they depend on.

It's frustratingly as though they hit the reset button at the start of every debate.

Ignorance appears to be a matter of pride, proudly displayed in the social media as some sort of achievement, to the extent that answers to the questions they purport to want answers to remain ignored or dismissed with the wave of a hand and a quick change of subject, often accompanied by abuse and/or an attempt to make the person who answered it feel guilty for supplying them with an answer they didn't want.

Malevolent Designer News - Just In Case You Thought the Divine Malevolence was Becoming Complacent

Kyasanur forest disease virus (red) infects lymph nodes in areas enriched for antibody-producing cells (green).

Image credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID/NIH, CC-BY 4.0

Scientists identify animal model for two emerging tick-borne hemorrhagic viruses - PLOS

Creationist mode:

As any Creationist will tell you, the intelligent [sic] designer is never one to sit back and rest on its laurels, admiring its handiwork. So, while the SARS-CoV-2 is wreaking havoc worldwide and killing people by the hundreds of thousands, it isn't just sitting back enjoying the spectacle. It is busy working on something else with which to cause death and suffering in the human population.

As reported today in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, Rebecca Broeckel at the National Institutes of Health in Montana, and colleagues, the malevolence who designed them has stolen a march on medical science by designing two tick-bourne haemorrhagic deseases, Kyasanur Forest disease and Alkhurma hemorrhagic disease, which are causing concern for public health officials, but for which until now, there were no suitable animal models for experimenting on.

After all, when you've put a lot of effort into designing a vector like the tick with which to infect people and other animals with the viruses and bacteria you create to make them sick, why not make full use of it, to spread a couple of new diseases, and then make it difficult for medical scientists to come up with cures?

As information provided by PLOS ahead of publication explains:

Malevolent Designer News - A Little Victory for Creationism's Divine Malevolence

Image: Murray Robertson, (CC-BY 4.0)

COVID-19 Delta variant may have increased ability to evade vaccine-induced immunity | PLoS

It looks like Creationism's divine malevolence, the mythical designer god they believe created everything, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and without whom no genetic change is possible, has scored a minor victory in its arms race with human medical science. - if you believe that Creationists nonsense.

In a study by Emma Thomson, Brian Willett, and colleagues at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, UK, published in PLOS Pathogens today, the authors show that the δ variant may be slightly better at evading the antibodies produced by the vaccines than the original type against which the vaccines were developed.

According to information supplied by PLOS ahead of publication:

[The study] suggests that COVID-19 Delta variant may be more successful at evading the protective response of vaccines.

Mutations change the shape of the COVID-19 spike protein, preventing antibody recognition and enabling the virus to escape vaccine-induced immunity; however, the extent to which vaccine recipients are immune from the Delta variant is unknown. To quantify the capacity of different variants (Alpha, Beta and Delta) to evade protective immune response in vaccines, researchers analyzed serum samples collected from healthy people who had received either the Pfizer or Astra Zeneca vaccine. 156 people had received two doses and 50 people had received one dose. They exposed SARS-CoV-2 proteins in a virus model system to sera from vaccinated people and observed the antibody response, measuring how effectively antibodies prevented each variant from infecting cells (virus neutralization). The researchers found that vaccines conferred protection from all COVID-19 variants but noted reduced antibody neutralization of both the Beta and Delta variants. Across all vaccinated individuals, the Delta variant reduced the immune response in recipients of both the Pfizer and Astra Zeneca vaccine 4.31 and 5.11-fold respectively. The study was not designed to measure vaccine efficacy directly, although it was in keeping with recent findings from Public Health England of slightly lower vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant than previous variants. It also did not report on serological study of people who received the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

In the summary to their open access paper, the authors say:

Author summary
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely to have emerged following a cross-species jump from bats to humans in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019. As the virus has evolved to adapt to humans, new viral variants have emerged that incorporate mutations in the “spike” gene. The spike protein is expressed on the surface of the virus, it facilitates entry into human cells and is the main target of neutralising antibodies. Mutations change the shape of the spike protein, preventing antibody recognition and enabling the virus to escape from the immunity induced by vaccination. Using samples collected from vaccinated people as part of the COVID-19 Deployed Vaccine Cohort Study (DOVE), we assessed the capacity of different variants (alpha, beta and delta) to evade the protective immune response in recipients of the Astra Zeneca ChAdOx1 and Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccines, both of which are based on the early Wuhan virus spike gene. We noted a reduction in neutralisation of both the beta and delta variants by vaccine sera from recipients of both vaccines. While vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe infection and death, ongoing monitoring of vaccine effectiveness is indicated as the virus continues to evolve over time, especially in vulnerable groups. [My emphasis]

It really is time the Deception Institute and its functionaries such as Michael J Behe, came clean on the issue of these viruses, especially in view of the devastation caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They need to say whether they will conceded that these viruses and their mutations are, as real scientists say, the result of an undirected, unintelligent, amoral natural process, which lets their beloved god off the hook so far as responsibility for the deaths and destruction are concerned, or whether they are going to continue to portray this putative designer god as the pestilential malevolence as it is currently portrayed by the intelligent [sic] design industry.

Of course, that would conceed that science is right about evolution being the creative natural process and so undermine their continuing efforts to destroy public confidence in science as a prelude to teaching their creationist myths as science in schools and eventually installing an extreme right-wing fundamentalist theocracy in the USA and elsewhere.

Reference

Davis C, Logan N, Tyson G, Orton R, Harvey WT, Perkins JS, et al. (2021)
Reduced neutralisation of the Delta (B.1.617.2) SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern following vaccination.
PLoS Pathog 17(12): e1010022. DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1010022

Covidiot Genocide News - A Court Backs the Self-Genocide of the US Christian Covidiot Right

Court temporarily blocks San Diego schools' vaccine mandate after suit filed by 16-year-old

Last Sunday, the Californian Ninth District Court of Appeals temporarily blocked San Diego Unified School District’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate from taking effect, one day before students were required to have their first dose.

In essence, the court accepted that the Evangelical Christian covidiot right's objection to the anti-COVID-19 vaccine is part of their religion and therefore protected by the US Constitution. There is nothing in the Bible which prohibits the use of vaccinations, which had not been invented when the books in it were being made up, because no-one then knew anything about germ theory, immunity or antibodies, and the Pope has ruled that it is not immoral to have the vaccines even if stem cells derived from the cells of an aborted foetus were used at some point in its development or testing, because being vaccinated serves a greater good. The vaccines are not, as some antivaxx disinformation sources claim, made from the cells of aborted foetuses.

The court ruling came after a sixteen-year-old Christian girl, backed by the right-wing Christian Thomas More Society, sued the San Diego Unified School District, claiming their mandated vaccination by the end of December 2021, was discriminatory because her faith deemed the vaccine 'morally problematic' because of their alleged association with abortions. The Talibangelical Thomas More Society is keen to promote any cause which amounts to imposing Christian fundamentalism on others and has opposed same-sex marriage on the grounds that Christians have a right to impose their religious view of marriage on others and to take ownership of the institution, obliging everyone to conform to their fundamentalist dogma.

Covidiot News - Another Irresponsible Antivaxx Lie Exposed

Complications in pregnancy and birth increase with COVID-19 infection - PLoS

According to figures published in PLoS Medicine today, pregnant women who have caught COVID-19 have about double the risk of developing serious, potentially life-threatening (for mother and foetus) complications during pregnancy, compared to those who remain free of the virus. For example, 4.8% of pregnant women infected with the virus are going to develop gestational diabetes as opposed to 1.3% of those who do not have COVID-19 and 16.7% are going to have a pre-term delivery at <37 weeks compared to the 7.1% of those who do not have the infection.

The inescapable conclusion then is that pregnant women and women intending to get pregnant in the near future should be vaccinated to lessen the chances of these complications arising. Any slight risk of rare complications from the vaccine are more than outweighed by the risks from the virus, contrary to widely believed lies being promulgated by antivaxxers for political ends.

According to information supplied ahead of the paper's publication in PLoS Medicine:

Christian Hypocrisy News - 'Blasphemous' Painting of George Floyd and a Black Madonna as a Pietà Stolen

Mama by Kelly Latimore

Stolen from the Mary Mirror of Justice Chapel,
Catholic University of America Law School, Washington DC.

'George Floyd' pieta stolen after artist receives death threats

After evoking outrage in white conservative Christian circles, a copy of a painting by St. Louis artist Kelly Latimore, depicting the body of George Floyd being cradled by a black Madonna in an artistic device known as a Pietà, has been stolen from the Mary Mirror of Justice Chapel in the Law School of the Catholic University of America, Washington DC.

Kelly, a devout Catholic, has also received death threats and the Catholic University has received several threatening and racist letters of protest over the display of the painting.

Malevolent Design News - Creationism's Malevolent Designer Is Not Giving Up Without a Fight!

A new 'variant of concern' (μ)

New Covid variant: How worried should we be? - BBC News

The news from South Africa is that we have a new, potentially very dangerous, variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with multiple mutations (or as Creationists will put it, multiple design improvements), including significant changes to the spike proteins against which the current vaccines produce antibodies.

The characteristics of the new variant, currently designated 8.1.1.529 and which will probably be designated by the WHO with the Greek letter μ (mu) tomorrow, are:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Malevolent Designer Got It's Retaliation in First With a More Lethal Variant of SARS-CoV-2

Mean trajectories of weekly cases and deaths for various model variants. Deterministic trajectories for the various model variants are shown, along with data (black). Models without change in infection fatality rate (IFR) are shown as dashed, models with change in IFR solid.

U.K. study suggests COVID-19 became much more lethal in late 2020 - PLoS

According to a study by Patrick Pietzonka and colleagues, of the University of Cambridge, UK, it looks, from an intelligent [sic] design perspective as though the putative divine malevolence who designed the SARS-CoV-2 virus, got it's retaliation in first, ahead of the approval of the anti-COVID-19 vaccines, in late 2020.

According to information supplied by PLoS ahead of publication, their new statistical analysis supports beliefs that COVID-19 became more lethal in the U.K. in late 2020, while also suggesting that multiple factors—not just the alpha variant of the virus that causes COVID-19—were to blame. According to their press release:

Studying how the lethality of COVID-19 has changed over time in different regions could help guide continued efforts to address this disease. While simple, preliminary evaluations of infection and mortality data suggest that COVID-19 may have become more lethal in the UK in late 2020, more rigorous analyses have been lacking.

Evolution News - How Our Neanderthal Genes Make us Both More Susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 Virus and Help Us Fight It.

Pie charts show the minor allele frequency at rs35044562.

Source: The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals
Frequency data were obtained from the 1000 Genomes Project"²².
Map source data were obtained from OpenStreetMap²³

Neanderthal genes increase risk of serious Covid-19, study claims | Science | The Guardian

Creationist mode:

Typical of evolutionary biologists, scientists are trying to lay the blame for some people's susceptibility to severe forms of COVID-19 in response to infection by the SARS-VoV-2 virus at the door of Neanderthals. Neanderthals are alleged to have interbred with early modern humans and passed on some of the genes to those of us who are descended from the results of these encounters.

As any intelligent [sic] design creationists will tell you, however, modern humans were created as is just a few thousand years ago complete with the genes that convey this susceptibility, provided by the designer in full and certain knowledge of what it would mean once it had created the SARS-CoV-2 virus - er… because it loves us.

Creationist mode:

At least that's the line of reasoning ID Creationists would be following if only they were honest enough and consistent enough to follow their argument through to its logical conclusion. However, their normal response is to claim that, whilst their putative creator god is the only entity capable of creating anything and so created everything, it only deserves the credit for the good things while someone or something else is to blame for all the bad things like viruses and genes that cause things like susceptibility to a severe form of COVID-19.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence COULD Have Protected us from Cancer, But Chose Not To.

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Galápagos tortoises.

Credit: Ylenia Chiari

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Galápagos tortoise.

Credit: Ylenia Chiari

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Galápagos tortoise.

Credit: Ylenia Chiari

Live long and prosper: Study examines genetic gems in Galápagos giant tortoise genomes - The Graduate School at the University at Buffalo - University at Buffalo

Hidden away inside the cells of the giant Galápagos tortoise is a secret that, if Creationists are to be believed, the same magic creator who designed humans and who also designed these long-lived reptiles, could have shared with humans, and indeed all other species prone to cancers, but it apparently chose not to.

The secret is in the way the giant Galápagos tortoise can detect cells that have gone wrong and rapidly destroy them in a process known as apoptosis, so killing the nascent tumour before it gets going. The scientists from the University of Buffalo, USA, who made this discovery believe the key to the tortoise's ability to do this lies in that embarrassment for Creationists - gene-doubling - so creating additional information in the genome. Increasing the amount of information in the genome without the intervention of their invisible friend is something Creationists will assure you can't happen because so they claim, new genetic information can't arise naturally, despite the evidence that it can and does.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Waging an Arms Race - With Itself!

The Aedes aegypti mosquito species, shown here obtaining a blood meal, is a vector for the dengue virus.

Articles - Dengue viral evolution study in Thailand - Emerging Pathogens Institute - University of Florida

A paper by a team of scientists from University of Florida, published recently in Science, shows how the four strains of the dengue virus circulating in Bangkok, Thailand, have changed in response to immunity in a population over a period of two decades. Being scientists, they attribute this to the natural process of evolution by natural selection, but, as any self-respecting Creationist (if any such exist) will tell you, because nothing changes genetically without their putative designer god's intelligent intervention, these changes must be because this divine malevolence is trying to find ways around the resistance to the virus our immune system is providing - an immune system which it also designed to protect us from is nasty little creations, allegedly!

We want to understand if or how immunity is driving extinction or persistence of particular lineages of dengue virus circulating in this one place. To do that, we characterized the immune signature of dengue viruses isolated in Bangkok over a long period of time.

We found that there is a pattern like influenza, where we get different viruses every year that are driven by natural selection for viruses that evade the human immune response to the population. We have shown that that this is also happening with dengue.

Professor Derek Cummings, senior author
Professor of biology
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.

This of course, is a classic evolutionary arms race, just as is predicted and expected by the theory of evolution by natural selection, but which, if we are to believe Creationists, can only mean their putative creator god is indulging in yet another bizarre arms race with itself, almost as though it suffers from a multiple personality syndrome. But it gets even more bizarre. There are four different versions (or serotypes) of the virus, named by scientists as DENV1 through DENV4, each of which appears to be competing with the others! As well as variation between strains, there are also smaller variations within strains.

It's as though there are four independent, competing designers, each responsible for just one strain of the virus, as well as a fifth designer responsible for the human immune system, and they're all competing with one another. The thought that this is one and the same, supposedly highly intelligent, designer simply beggars belief.

Our findings suggest that the dengue viruses are moving away from the viruses that generated immunity in the population in the past. It’s sort of like the flu story, dengue is evolving to escape the immunity that is in the population at any particular time. But it seems to be happening at a slower pace with dengue than influenza.

Professor Henrik Salje, co-author
Assistant professor
Department of Biology and Emerging Pathogens Institute
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

The scientists analysed the genomes of the viruses in 1,944 archived blood samples from Bangkok. The samples were preserved from people known to be ill with dengue and they represent all four dengue virus strains from every year between 1994 and 2014. The team genetically sequenced more than 2,000 virus samples. They then tested a subset of these samples that represented a time series of each strain. From this they were able to characterise the antigenic relationship of the strains to each other through time. This showed how well (or badly) an immune response to one strain protects against another strain.

These results were then plotted on a chart to make a map showing how far from the original strain(s) and from one another, the viruses had moved over time.

This scatter plot depicts the movement of antigenic distance within and between each DENV serotype. Yellow circles date to 1994, green to 2004, and purple to 2014.

They showed that, just like influenza where a different strain of virus arises every year in response to immunity in the human population, dengue virus strains do the same and in doing so, also tend to diverge away from one another so they can overcome the immunity produced by the other strains. Immunity produced by one strain is the environmental factor driving the evolution not only of that strain but of the other three strains as well.

The results also show a clear inverse relationship between the level of antigenic diversity in a given year and epidemic levels. When Thailand experienced large epidemic outbreaks, antigenic diversity was low. But in years when epidemic levels were lower than average, the antigenic diversity was higher. They also showed that the assumption that infection by one strain of the virus would also protect people against the other strains was not strictly true, since reinfections are now known to have occurred. The reason for this is that the virus evolves to evade the antibodies produced by an earlier infection, or to put that in evolutionary terms, those viruses that survive and get passed on are those which are able to infect despite the presence of antibodies to earlier strains in the population. In this way the presence of genetic variations which enable this evasion tend to increase in the population of that strain.

Classic evolution by natural selection.

In the abstract to their published paper in Science the team say:

Variations in disease enhancement

Secondary Dengue virus (DENV) infections can be dangerous if levels of antibodies from prior infection are inadequate to clear the virus. This RNA flavivirus exploits the presence of lower levels of heterotypic antibodies to infect immunoglobulin Fcγ receptor–bearing cells. Many RNA viruses also exhibit antigenic variation, which classically allows evasion of immune responses. Katzelnick et al. investigated whether antigenic variation in DENV has a biological function in a virus that courts immune responses to enhance replication (see the Perspective by Rohani and Drake). Using antigenic cartography on a panel of more than 400 DENV1-4 subtype samples isolated in Bangkok, Thailand, the authors found that antigenic variation in virus populations oscillated between similarity and dissimilarity across subtypes over time, with outbreaks correlating with periods of antigenic dissimilarity within serotypes. This pattern may be at least in part a result of the conflicting evolutionary pressures of immune evasion and immune enhancement. — CA


Abstract

Infection with one of dengue viruses 1 to 4 (DENV1-4) induces protective antibodies against homotypic infection. However, a notable feature of dengue viruses is the ability to use preexisting heterotypic antibodies to infect Fcγ receptor–bearing immune cells, leading to higher viral load and immunopathological events that augment disease. We tracked the antigenic dynamics of each DENV serotype by using 1944 sequenced isolates from Bangkok, Thailand, between 1994 and 2014 (348 strains), in comparison with regional and global DENV antigenic diversity (64 strains). Over the course of 20 years, the Thailand DENV serotypes gradually evolved away from one another. However, for brief periods, the serotypes increased in similarity, with corresponding changes in epidemic magnitude. Antigenic evolution within a genotype involved a trade-off between two types of antigenic change (within-serotype and between-serotype), whereas genotype replacement resulted in antigenic change away from all serotypes. These findings provide insights into theorized dynamics in antigenic evolution.

Katzelnick Leah C.; Coello Escoto Ana; Huang Angkana T.; Garcia-Carreras Bernardo; Chowdhury Nayeem; Maljkovic Berry Irina; Chavez Chris; Buchy Philippe; Duong Veasna; Dussart Philippe; Gromowski Gregory; Macareo Louis; Thaisomboonsuk Butsaya; Fernandez Stefan; Smith Derek J.; Jarman Richard; Whitehead Stephen S.; Salje Henrik; Cummings Derek A. T.
Antigenic evolution of dengue viruses over 20 years
Science 2021 374 (6570); 999-1004; DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0058

© 2021 The Authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Reprinted with kind permission under license #5193010127296.

A very clear case then of how a virus can evolve according to the changes in its environment and how strains diversify when in competition for the same resource and in the presence of antibodies produced by their competitors. As with SARS-CoV2, Creationists are left to explain this in terms of intelligent design by their favourite putative god, rather than to attribute it to a natural process not involving any gods, their favourite included. For reasons which have never been explained they prefer to present this god as the malevolent and rather stupid entity behind these parasites and the resultant arms races with itself.

One wonders what it would think of their portrayal of it, if it were real.

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Evolution News - One of Our Missing Links is still Missing!

In the shallows near shore, Tetrapodophis amplectus glides through a tangle of branches from the conifer Duartenia araripensis that have fallen into the water, sharing this habitat with a water bug in the family Belostomatidae and small fish (Dastilbe sp.).

Image credit: Julius Csotonyi

Paleontologists debunk fossil thought to be missing link between lizards and first snakes - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

In a very nice example of the self-correcting nature of science, a paper published three days ago in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, scientist led by University of Alberta palaeontologist Michael Caldwell, produce evidence refuting an earlier claim to have identified a fossil of a 'missing link' between snakes and lizards, from which snakes are assumed to have evolved, with a detailed reassessment showing that the fossil was not of a snake but in fact a highly adapted aquatic lizard.

This is the sort of science which will gladden the heart of any dedicated creationist trying desperately to ignore the evidence of the very many other 'missing' link fossils which turn up almost routinely in the scientific literature - until, that is, it dawns on them that this willingness to reassess and revise is exactly what gives the scientific method its great power to reveal the truth of the natural world as opposed to the theological method which looks for reasons not to change one's mind but to reinforce the sacred dogmas - like the Creationist insistence that there are no missing link fossils.