Chapter 25

Bad Design—Our Biochemical Pathways: If Cats Don’t Die of Scurvy, Then Why Do We?

Figure 25.1 Why is this cat smiling?

Because it can’t get scurvy.

One of the things that ID people love to point at is our biochemical pathways. They say that these pathways are so complicated and so perfect that they must be the work of an intelligent Creator.

I say that if indeed the Creator did design our biochemical pathways, then he has to account for the millions of cases of scurvy and the resulting miserable human deaths that have happened on his watch.

Here’s what a biochemical pathway is: a complicated set of chemical interactions that work together, usually in a particular sequence, to produce a particular substance that is needed by the body. These series of reactions are sometimes very long and complicated.

Here’s why our biochemical pathways are a case of bad design: we have the pathway for making vitamin C, but it isn’t finished. Having an incomplete pathway for making a vital nutrient is bad design.

When our bodies lack vitamin C, we get scurvy. When we get scurvy, our bodies can’t produce the proteins that make up the tissues and ligaments that hold us together, and we literally fall apart, among other problems.

Scurvy is a really ugly disease, with brutal symptoms. Human beings can die of scurvy.

Here is what happens when you get scurvy: Blood vessels break and bleed under the skin, forming tiny red spots, and blood can ooze from our skin, especially around hair follicles. We get rough skin, internal bleeding, and blotchy bruises all over the body, particularly on the legs. Legs and arms can swell up, wounds will not heal, and old wounds that have been covered with scar tissue can reopen. We get weak, brittle bones. Skin can become dough-like or gangrenous, and gums can redden, recede, and blacken. Teeth loosen and fall out.

There is also growth cessation, tenderness to touch, weakness, bone fragility, and joint pain.

We get anemia from impaired iron absorption, frequent infections due to suppression of the immune system, muscle degeneration, pain, fatigue, hysteria, and depression.

Here are pictures of some of the symptoms of scurvy.

Figure 25.2 Symptoms of scurvy: gums.

Gums redden, recede, and blacken. Teeth loosen and fall out.

Figure 25.23 Scorbutic tongue.

Small blood vessels just under the surface of the tongue break and release blood.

Figure 25.4 Symptoms of scurvy: skin.

Blood vessels break and bleed under the skin.

Figure 25.5 Symptoms of scurvy: legs, back.

We get rough skin and blotchy bruises all over the body, particularly on the legs. Bruises and exertion can result in internal bleeding. Legs and arms can swell up.

If we have scurvy for long enough, we die.

Having a biochemical pathway that isn’t quite finished—and this can kill you—is really bad design.

So ID types love to talk about our biochemical pathways, but they don’t mention the one for making vitamin C. That’s because humans don’t have a complete setup for making vitamin C—but cats do. I’ll say that again: cats can produce their own vitamin C —but humans can’t.

Does this sound like the work of an intelligent Creator? Does this Creator like cats better than humans?

Since we can’t make vitamin C, human beings have to get that vitamin by eating certain fresh fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, not everybody gets to have fresh fruits and vegetables.

The Bad Old Days

In fact, in the days before we had easy transportation and refrigeration, people in northern climates, often suffered from scurvy during the winter, when fresh fruits and vegetables were scarce. Indigenous people in Canada invented a tea made from the annedda tree to drink during the winter to prevent scurvy. Guess what the annedda is? It’s the Eastern White Cedar. Does drinking a boiled infusion of this particular tree’s wood and needles sound like a natural, or a delicious part of a diet? Do we think they drank this for fun? No. It was a concoction invented by people in a northern climate desperate for a way to prevent scurvy during the winter. Basically, we humans originally invented medicine in part to help save us from dying (too often) from ailments that could have been prevented if we’d been designed right.

People in other civilizations were not lucky enough to have heard of this cure, and they died in the winter of scurvy instead. People with scurvy are reported as early as in ancient Rome, and from as far away as China.

In the days of sailing ships, when there were long voyages and a lack of refrigeration, scurvy famously killed more sailors than drowning and piracy and all other diseases combined. A sailor on a voyage of exploration had a 50 percent chance of dying of some disease, usually scurvy, by the end of the voyage. Naval operations were limited by the amount of time that people could be at sea before they started to die from scurvy. It’s why British sailors became known as “limeys.” Eventually, the British government—to whom naval operations were extremely important—figured out that eating citrus fruits could prevent scurvy. So, every day, British sailors were required to drink a small portion of lime juice, so as to not get scurvy. The ship’s cats were not required to do this, and they didn’t get scurvy anyway.

In fact, cats don’t eat fresh fruits and vegetables at all. I have never seen a cat sit down and eat an orange. Or even a cabbage. Yet they don’t fall apart.

Figure 25.6 This cat didn’t eat fresh produce. It didn’t get scurvy.

Figure 25.7 This man didn’t eat fresh produce. He did get scurvy.

Is this any way for God to behave? It gets worse.

In Robert F. Scott’s famous expedition to the South Pole on which he and all the men in his exploration party died after they reached the South Pole, all of the men in this party suffered from scurvy, which very likely contributed heavily to their deaths.

Meanwhile, there were seals lounging on the coast of Antarctica that never got scurvy. Do we think that the fish-eating seals ate fresh fruits and vegetables? Do we think that the seals ate fresh fruits and vegetables ever, in their entire lives? Do we think that the seals ate imported vitamin C tablets that hadn’t been invented yet?

No—the seals made their own vitamin C.

What’s more, on polar expeditions in general, the sled dogs and the men were away from fresh supplies for weeks and months on end. Yet the men got scurvy, and the dogs didn’t. Why? Because the dogs made their own vitamin C.

Seals and dogs can make vitamin C but humans can’t.

What Was the Creator Thinking?

In fact most animals have the capacity to make vitamin C, but we don’t. One of the few groups of animals that can’t make their own vitamin C is us and our simian relatives. Simians are monkeys, apes, chimpanzees, humans, and so on.

Is this fair? Does the Creator like dogs better than us? What about cats and seals? For that matter, what about rats and vultures? They can make vitamin C, too. What have rats and vultures got that we haven’t got? I’ll tell you what they’ve got. They have a complete biochemical pathway for making vitamin C.62

And we don’t.

It gets worse. We have the entire pathway except for the last step.

I’ll say that again: We have the biochemical pathway that can make vitamin C, except that it’s missing the last step. All we are missing is the ability to make one enzyme, in the last step of the process. Why are we missing this enzyme? One bad gene, that’s all. We have one gene that mutated so we can’t make one enzyme. This prevents us from making vitamin C.

Having a biochemical pathway that’s complete except for the last step is bad design.

And again, having a biochemical pathway that is complete except for the last step and this can kill you is really bad design.

But having a biochemical pathway that is complete except for the last step, and this can kill you, and the only thing you are missing is the ability to make one enzyme in the last step, and nearly all other animals have the full and complete pathway, is excruciatingly bad design.

Having a biochemical pathway that nearly all other animals have, but we only have part of it, because we are missing the ability to make one enzyme in the last step is not the sign of an intelligent Creator.

In fact, it’s proof that we’ve evolved, rather than being designed.

Evolutionary Theory and the Signature in the Cell

Why? Because evolutionary theory predicts this lousy biochemical pathway, and ID does not. In fact, ID wants to tell you that all of our pathways are wonderful. That’s what the design inference is all about. Here’s why this lousy pathway is predicted by evolution.

Most other animals can make their own vitamin C, by way of a specific biochemical pathway. Humans can’t. But evolutionary theory says that we humans share common ancestors with the many species that can make vitamin C.

Evolutionary theory therefore says that we should find evidence of this shared ancestry, with at least some portion of the ancestral vitamin C-making pathway being found in humans.

And that’s what we find. Humans and other simians have that vitamin C-creating pathway, but it’s incomplete. It’s missing the ability to create that one enzyme. Does this look like the work of an intelligent Creator? No. It looks like the work of a random, and in our case unfortunate, mutation.

Dr. Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute claims that the DNA in our cells shows the “signature” of our Creator.63 Unfortunately for Dr. Meyer, that “signature” in our vitamin C pathway says evolution.

How Did We Get That Way?

Let me fill in the rest of the picture. Some ancestors of ours had a mutation that left us unable to manufacture that one last enzyme needed for making vitamin C. If we had been dogs or cats or other carnivores that get next to no vitamin C through their diets, then individuals with that mutation would have died out quickly. But because we simians have always eaten a mixed diet of meats plus fruits and vegetables, those ancestors with that unfortunate mutation survived, because the mutation didn’t kill us before we reproduced . . . too often.

This would have continued to work well enough if humans hadn’t turned out to be particularly successful primates that spread all over the world. Most nonhuman primates live in tropical and subtropical areas where there are plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables to eat throughout the year. With all that vitamin C being taken in through their diets, scurvy generally wasn’t a lethal problem for our primate ancestors, even with their defective gene that wouldn’t allow them to produce their own vitamin C.

But humans have spread all over the world, including settling into climates that didn’t provide them with year-round fresh produce or other sources of vitamin C. So scurvy killed us from time to time. But it didn’t kill the cats and rats and dogs living with us. Curious humans also set off on voyages of exploration in sailing ships where they had no access to fresh produce for months on end. Then scurvy killed a whole lot of them. But it didn’t kill the ship’s cats, or the ship’s rats.

Now you may say that voyages of exploration are an unnatural environment, and that people in more normal conditions wouldn’t get scurvy. But people in northern climates routinely got scurvy during the winter.

Why would the Creator make human beings suffer from scurvy during the winter, but not rats?

For your additional enjoyment, here is a description of sailors who were dying of scurvy in the 1830s. This is a passage from Two Years Before The Mast,64 on the joys of suffering from scurvy during the age of sail. In this sequence, a young sailor is describing the effects of scurvy on members of the crew.

The scurvy had begun to show itself on board. One man had it so badly as to be disabled and off duty, and the English lad, Ben, was in a dreadful state, and was daily growing worse. His legs swelled and pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so that if it was pressed in, it would not return to its shape; and his gums swelled until he could not open his mouth. His breath, too, became very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would be a dead man in a week, at the rate at which he was sinking.

Aren’t you glad that the Creator gave you the opportunity to die of such a horrible disease, but spared all the sweet little rats?

Figure 25.8 Rat.

62. Carlos Martinez Del Rio, “Can Passerines Synthesize Vitamin C?,” The Auk, 1997, 114 (3), 513–16.

63. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 470.

64. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before The Mast (New York: P. F. Collier and Son), 1909. This is an autobiographical account of a young American’s experience as a hired sailor from 1834 to 1836.