The Human Being Is a Valuable Design

There’s more amazing technology going on inside you than meets the eye.  Should not human life be honored and protected?

1. You as a rose:  Before you were implanted in your mother’s womb, your embryo looked like a rosette (Science Daily).
2. Wrinkled fingers:  When your fingers get wet, proteins expand in a complex, reversible matrix shown on Science Daily.  “These keratin strands interlock to form a three-dimensional lattice — which can increase its volume by five times when the strands stretch out.”  (cf. 1/10/13 entry.)
3. Sweat healing:  Your sweat glands don’t just help regulate body temperature; they also help heal injuries (Medical Xpress).  That’s because they are “a source of stem cells particularly suited to healing wounds – stem cells that form new skin cells and manage the healing process.”
4. Cancer cleanup crew:  Your “red alert” squadron patrols your blood stream, killing spontaneous cancers on a daily basis (Science Daily).  “It seems that our immune system is better equipped than we imagined,” a doctor said.
5. Binocular advantage:  Having two eyes helps in reading, a paper in Current Biology found.  “Monocular presentation of text poses a substantial cost to efficient reading,” the authors say, demonstrating a “binocular advantage” to vision.  Although one-eyed readers can get by, “Binocular inputs increase efficiency of both parafoveal and foveal processing.”

The brain, in particular, is a source of fascination for researchers.  Medical Xpress said understanding the brain “is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science.”  Here’s a factoid to file away for water-coooler conversation, followed by some other news about the brain:

“The brain has the ability to efficiently perform computations that are impossible even for the most powerful computers while consuming only 30 Watts of power,” [Karlheinz] Meier [U of Heidelberg] says.

1. Brain tune-up:  Your brain is fine-tuning its wiring throughout your life, Science Daily reported.  “Our brain is changing throughout our lives. These changes underlie the capacities that emerge and are refined through adulthood.”
2. Brain code:  Your brain uses a common code for space, time, and distance (Science Daily).
3. Mind tricks:  You can scratch a mirror image of your itch to get relief, New Scientist reported.
4. Switchboard:  Science Daily spoke of the brain having a switchboard called the habenula that functions “to guide behavior in response to external stimuli.”
5. Uniquely human:  The ventrolateral frontal cortex “appears unlike anything in the brains of some of our closest relatives,” Science Daily reported about MRI comparisons between human and macaque brains.  It “does not seem to have an equivalent in the monkey at all,” a researcher said.  This area “may be critical for our ability to understand and generate speech.“

These findings underscore the tragedy of abortion.  Medical Xpress reported about the forced abortions in China, telling the story of a young mother begging for mercy as “Several people pinned her head, arms, knees and ankles to a hospital bed before driving a syringe of labor-inducing drugs into her stomach.”  Her crime?  Having a second baby boy.  Birth, though, may not provide safety.  As predicted, Belgian lawmakers have extended the country’s euthanasia law to include minors, Medical Xpress said.

Evolution News & Views used this news as an example of why its new e-book Wesley J. Smith, The War on Humans, published today, is so timely.  The WarOnHumans.com website includes a half-hour video about the anti-human implications of the evolutionary worldview, now working out in our culture with deadly force.  The book and film argue that abortion, euthanasia, and the view of man as a “plague on the earth” is “what inevitably happens when a civilization gradually loses the sense of awe in which it once held human life, replaced with the Darwinian conviction that man is simply on a continuum with other animals.”

What contrast could be more stark than the awe-inspiring design of the human body and brain, juxtaposed with the anti-human, death-loving, sadistic cruelty of the Darwinian mindset?  Watch the shocking video on WarOnHumans.com.  Promote life!  Spread this article to your Facebook and Twitter followers.