More Than Meets the Eye

by Richard Swenson

  Jurassic Park meets Brave New World, coming soon to a theater near you:

  Journalists are writing seriously about the “possibility of virgin births, resurrecting the dead, and women giving birth to themselves.”39

  Cow eggs had the bovine genetic material replaced with that of a pig and grew seventy pig embryos, giving rise to the question “Could a cow give birth to a human baby?”40

  Advanced Cell Technology reported that it had made a semi-human embryo by putting DNA from one of its scientist’s cells into a cow’s egg with bovine DNA removed.41

  Human genes have been put within cloned sheep, making them a “drug factory.”

  The French cult Raelian Movement has formed a Bahamas-based company called CLONAID, the world’s first commercial human cloning service. For “as low as $200,000” CLONAID will provide a cloned child to anyone wishing it, including “parents with fertility problems or homosexual couples.” If a man should die early in life, “imagine the joy of a widow raising a child looking like her beloved deceased husband.” Did anyone say Oedipal complex? This cult believes that life on earth was created scientifically in laboratories by extraterrestrials whose name (Elohim) is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated as the word “God.” It also claims that Jesus’ resurrection was a cloning performed by the Elohim. For a $50,000 fee, they will provide INSURACLONE, the sampling and storage of cells from a loved one to be cloned later if the beloved person dies unexpectedly. Farfetched? They expect one million cloning customers.42

  The above is but a partial accounting of the future ethical fog rolling down from the mountaintops. I don’t know if you can get a sense of the historic nature of it all, but we are playing with an explosive never before touched by human hands, while still not quite sure of God’s opinion on the matter. Before venturing into such a playground, I think it best to stop first at the gate and ask God: “Do you mind if I play?”

  The SKIN, STOMACH,

  SKELETON, and SPERM

  WHAT God accomplished in creating the human body would have won Him Nobel Prizes in biology, chemistry, and physics every year for eternity—plus undoubtedly a couple of Emmys for most entertaining sitcom. Even though we have visited perhaps the most exciting destinations on our human design tour, there are still a few more points of interest to be considered. It would seem unappreciative of His efforts if we did not pause to regard these additional displays of His impressive workmanship.

  Integumentary System

  Skin— Although we seldom think of it as such, the skin is the largest organ of the body. It weighs eight or nine pounds and has a surface area of over two square yards. The skin performs remarkable services. For one, it keeps all the water inside. Our bodies are 60 percent water, and were it not for the skin we would quickly puddle the floor.

  Yet “keeping the water in” is a much more complex process than it appears. The skin must keep almost all of the water in, while allowing some to escape, through sweating, for temperature control. In addition, it must be waterproof from the outside as well. “If I had to choose skin’s most crucial contribution,” explains world renowned leprosy surgeon and author Paul Brand, “I might opt for waterproofing.”1

  Solvents and disinfectants that damage the cutaneous barrier can increase water loss up to seventy-five times. On an even more dramatic level, the breakdown of this important function of fluid balance is the reason severe burns can be so deadly. Many people who die acutely from extensive burns succumb to dehydration. With the protective skin destroyed, serous fluids escape out of the tissues, and with them escapes life itself.

  The skin also protects against the invasion of harmful agents, including chemicals and microbes. Untold billions of bacteria reside on our skin, most of them benignly, yet a few maliciously. The skin is an unyielding and vigilant guard.

  Our skin color, controlled by melanocytes and melanin, is determined primarily by a mere four to six genes—that is, four to six genes out of the total 100 thousand. It seems a bit unfair that less than one-hundredth of one percent of our genetic structure is coded for differences in skin color, yet the results often seem like more than 99.99 percent.

  Skin sensitivity to touch varies greatly. Pinching the ear is relatively painless but pricking the fingertip is annoying. Some segments of skin have thousands of nerve receptors per square inch. The pain communicated through these receptors is in fact an important benefit saving us from repeated traumatic and thermal damage.

  Skin cells are continuously turning over—billions every day. The epidermis is replaced every couple of weeks, which is thus the duration of a suntan or super glue spill. Over a lifetime we each shed forty pounds of dead skin, perhaps explaining why old sofas weigh so much.

  Youthful skin is remarkably elastic. As the skin ages, however, it loses elasticity due to changes in collagen. With the loss of elasticity, facial expressions begin to etch permanent lines. It has been estimated that it takes 200 thousand frowns to make a permanent line.2 The structural fingerprint grooves are highly individual-specific, causing Scotland Yard to introduce them as a criminal detection classification in 1901.

  Blood flow to the skin can vary tremendously—in some areas by a factor of 150 times. This is important for the crucial temperature control of the body but also plays a role in social blushing. Blushing is a function of dramatically increased blood flow to the skin surface, most notably of the face. It is involuntary and for those so prone, it cannot be controlled. Humans are the only creatures that have this capacity. Jeremiah talked, however, about a sinfulness so deep that “they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.”3

  Blushing, however, was not responsible for Moses’ changed appearance when he descended from Mount Sinai, for after meeting with God “the skin of his face shone.”4 The people were appropriately impressed. Until they forgot.

  Sweat glands— As mentioned, the skin plays a vital role in temperature regulation both through conductive heat loss (by shunting blood to the body’s surface) and through perspiration. About a pint of water is undetectably lost through the skin every day, called insensible perspiration. When the thermometer is blistering, however, the amount of water lost increases dramatically. It is possible to lose as much as two gallons a day through overt perspiration. If this sweating mechanism breaks down during vigorous exercise on a hot day, core body temperatures can shoot up rapidly and death by heat stroke becomes a serious threat.

  Humans have several different types of skin glands, but the most infamous (that is, odoriferous) are the eccrine sweat glands. A single square inch of the palm can contain three thousand such glands, while the soles of the feet have a total of one-quarter million.

  We may wonder why such a classy God would choose such a sweaty mechanism for temperature control. Surely His design options were not limited to only this one possibility. Yet despite whatever physical discomfort and social embarrassment accompanies perspiration, it is an effective mechanism. Maybe God is trying to teach us that social acceptability based on superficial issues isn’t quite as important to Him as it is to us. And of course, we also must contend with that penalizing verse in Genesis: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground.”5

  Hair— Human hair, as strong as aluminum, grows on all portions of the body except the palms and soles. There are five million hair follicles in the body, including one hundred thousand hair follicles on the scalp alone. Combining the activity of all these scalp follicles together, they grow one thousand inches of hair each day. Individually over its lifetime, each follicle will produce twenty-six feet of hair. Collectively over this same duration, the scalp will produce nearly five hundred miles of hair.

  The hair follicles of each anatomic region have their own unique growth and rest cycles. On the head, for example, hair follicles have a growing cycle of between two and seven years, followed by a rest cycle of three months. During the growth cycle, the hair will experience daily lengthening. During the rest cycle,
the hair will maintain the same length for the duration. When the next growth cycle begins, a new hair erupting from the follicle punches out the old hair. Thus we naturally lose 50 to 125 hairs per day.

  We tend to place a fair amount of emphasis on our hair. While at a certain level this is not wrong, we should always be asking prioritizing questions about such behavior. The apostle Peter advised: “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”6 To me, there is no greater beauty than the beauty that comes from purity.

  In The Penitent, author and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of a man who experiences prosperity yet also profound emptiness in the U.S. During a search for meaning, he flees to Israel only to find an extension of the same materialist emptiness. Finally he discovers fulfillment in Jewish orthodoxy.

  On one occasion, he sits at dinner in the home of a rabbi. Inquiring about the rabbi’s children, he discovers all have died except one. The sole remaining child is a young widow who lives nearby. At just that moment she unexpectedly comes for a visit.

  Just as we sat talking, the door opened and in came a young woman with a kerchief over her head. She looked no more than eighteen, but I later learned she was twenty-four. One look sufficed to tell me a lot about her: first of all, that hers was a rare beauty, not the kind fashioned in beauty parlors, but the beauty and charm that’s given by God.

  Secondly, I saw that she glowed with the grace of chastity. The concept that the eyes are the windows of the soul is not a mere figure of speech. You can see in a person’s eyes whether he is full of arrogance or modesty, honesty or cunning, pride or humility, fear of God or abandon. This young woman’s eyes reflected all … the great qualities mentioned in The Path of Righteousness.7

  There is beauty … and then there is beauty. One is provided by “outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes” and is highly valued by social norms. The other is provided by the “inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” and is highly valued by God Himself.

  Nails and teeth— Nails and teeth come from the same embryonic layers as do skin and hair. Perhaps the ancients understood embryology better than we give them credit for, as when Job said: “I have escaped with only the skin of my teeth.”8

  Nails grow slowly. At about two inches a year, this rate is only slightly less than the rate at which Mount Everest is moving toward China (two and a half inches a year).9 Cumulatively during our lifetime we grow almost 100 feet of fingernails.

  The teeth are made up of four types of material, including enamel, the strongest substance in the body. It is ironic that such seemingly impenetrable materials should be so susceptible to decay. Perhaps this is the dental equivalent of “Let any one who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”10 Bacteria react with carbohydrates in the mouth to form acids capable of dissolving the enamel. The breakdown of the enamel permits other bacteria to penetrate the dentin, eventually producing a cavity. Once this process begins, teeth do not have the capacity to repair themselves.

  The teeth appear so strong, shiny, and straight. That’s one moment. But in the next, they can break in an unexpected injury. Or, insidiously, they can crumble from slow, steady internal decay. In the same way, God can break us: “You have broken the teeth of the wicked,” wrote David.11 Or He can leave us alone and allow the decaying process of sin to bring internal corrosion. Either way the knee will be bowed. In referring to Himself as the cornerstone, Jesus offered this interesting verse: “Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”12 One way or the other, we all will be broken.

  Jesus often referred to that time of judgment where there would be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”13 I don’t know exactly what gnashing of teeth is, but from the sound of it, I think I’d rather be elsewhere.

  Digestive System

  All human activities, even rest, require energy (see Figure 2). To provide this needed energy, our bodies require the periodic intake of nutrition, just as an automobile’s engine requires an occasional fill-up at the pump. The digestive system takes this raw “fuel” in the form of food, processes it, and sends it to the cells, where biochemical processes convert it into usable fuel for the tiny cellular biofires.

  The digestive system is perhaps more “linear” than other complex body processes, acting at times like a simple hollow tube. But don’t underestimate it, for it is in fact extraordinarily complex. It involves many organs and numerous wide-ranging chemicals and enzymes. The beginning-to-end process is already generally well known, so we will only highlight the more striking aspects of this system.

  The average stomach has about a one-quart capacity. Throughout the day, however, it produces over three quarts of gastric fluid, including hydrochloric acid in a concentration strong enough to cause tissue damage. That the muscular stomach does not digest itself is remarkable.

  As the food passes through the pylorus of the stomach, it enters the twenty-two-foot-long small intestine. Here digestive enzymes are added and most of the work of absorption is performed. Because of the extreme redundancy of innumerable tiny, finger-like projections called villi and even smaller microvilli, the overall absorptive surface area of the small intestine equals that of a tennis court.

  The small intestines contain not only chemical enzymes and large surface areas, but also what has been called a second brain. “Structurally and neurochemically, the enteric nervous system (ENS) is a brain unto itself,” explains cell biologist Michael D. Gershon.15 The nutrition-to-energy process is so essential to our survival that God apparently did not trust it to the simple principles of mechanics.

  Soon after entering the small intestine, food passes the sphincter where the liver and gall bladder add their contributions. Next to the skin, the football-sized three-pound liver is the largest organ of the body. Its 300 billion cells perform over 500 functions. The gall bladder, tucked under the liver almost as if it were hiding from the chest cavity, releases more than a pint of bile every day (the bile itself is actually made in the liver but stored in the gall bladder). While the gall bladder is surgically expendable, the presence of a healthy liver is not optional.

  All of the blood flowing away from the stomach and intestines must first pass through the liver before reaching the rest of the body. The liver is thus situated at a crucial crossroads, entailing countless responsibilities. It detoxifies substances, guards vitamin and mineral supplies, stockpiles sugar, produces quick energy, manufactures new proteins, regulates clotting factors, controls cholesterol, makes bile, maintains hormone balance, stores iron, assists immune function, and is even responsible for making the fetal blood cells in the womb. One thing it does not do is complain. It will work and work without protest, even under enormous abuse.16

  More than any other organ in the body, the liver has tremendous regenerative properties. Actually, liver cells rarely reproduce themselves in a healthy body—all of their attention is given to the myriad of tasks that cannot be performed by any other tissue. However, when a part of the liver is injured or destroyed, the remaining healthy cells go into Amish barn-building mode. In such a crisis, “virtually all of the surviving hepatocytes leave their normal, growth-arrested state and proliferate until the destroyed part of the liver is replaced,” explain hepatologists Anna Mae Diehl, M.D., and Clifford Steer, M.D., of the American Liver Foundation. “Amazingly, the liver is generally able to perform its usual functions, even when large fractions of hepatocytes are actively replicating.”17

  The liver’s remarkable ability to regenerate was noted even in ancient times. “Remember,” observe Diehl and Steer, “Zeus punished his enemy by chaining Prometheus to a rock and ordering a bird of prey to devour his liver daily. Aware that the liver could regenerate overnight, Zeu
s had devised a plan that would damn Prometheus to eternal torture without allowing him to escape by death.”18

  The six-inch pancreas also joins the plumbing at the same point as the liver and gall bladder. In addition to producing important digestive enzymes, it also contains small groups of cells called the islands of Langerhans. These specialized cells produce the insulin that regulates blood sugar levels.

  The large intestine has as its main activity the absorption of water, sodium, and other minerals. Once any remaining food particles enter the colon, the brakes are applied. Now in slow motion, every particle passing by is carefully inspected by the colonic lining. Here the mucosal cells have one last chance to salvage any useful ingredients that the body might need.

  The digestive tract is a 95 percent efficient energy extractor. If we eat something rich in calories, it is unreasonable to hope that much of the caloric burden will not be absorbed. In fact, very little of the energy that we ingest fails to make its ultimate presence known within our weighted-down cells. It is wishful thinking to hope that irresponsible eating on our part will be overlooked by an inefficient design on God’s part. He doesn’t work that way.