Humans Archives

June 29, 2026June 23, 2026

The Whites of the Eyes

“Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!” That was an order given by Colonel William Prescott to the Colonial soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution. The reason for the order was not to get close to the British soldiers to get to know them, but because the Colonial Army was low on ammunition and Prescott wanted to make sure it wasn’t wasted. Seeing the whites of the eyes may be dangerous in warfare, but it’s valuable for communication.

Human eyes come in various colors, such as blue, brown, or green, but that refers to the iris. The area surrounding the iris is called the sclera. In humans, the sclera is white, or at least close to white. That makes us different from other animals, since most mammals have dark eyes. The question is, why are the whites of the eyes the way they are?

In 1997, Shiro Kohshima, a Japanese biologist at Kyoto University, compared the eyes of primates and found that only humans had white in their eyes. He proposed that the white sclera helps us communicate because the contrast between the white and the dark pupils makes it easier to tell where someone is looking. Parents can often tell if their child is telling the truth by whether the child is looking at the parent. When someone looks away, it may mean they are hiding something. The whites of the eyes tend to draw our attention away. When someone looks us directly in the eye, it helps us to bond with that person. Thus, the white sclera helps us communicate or avoid communicating.

In 2007, Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at Duke University, expanded on Kohshima’s theory, developing a cooperative eye hypothesis. He said that the whites of the eyes help us determine what someone is focused on because we are sensitive to where a person is looking. Tomasello conducted experiments on human infants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. He did this by looking at the ceiling with only his eyes, only his head, or both, to see how humans and primates would react.

Tomasello found that human infants followed the researcher’s eye direction three times more often when he glanced toward the ceiling with his eyes only than when he tilted his head upward with his eyes closed. He found that the primates did the opposite. For them, following the head movement was more important than following eye movement.

From an early age, humans are very sensitive to eye contact. Within the first few days, babies looked longer at faces that were directed at them. In two to four months, babies learn to follow where others are looking. You can hold the attention of babies by looking directly at them. When the parent looks at an object and names it, this helps the infant connect the name to the object, improving language skills.

Even though some people’s eyes are not as white as others’ due to age, health, or race, humans do show more of the sclera than other animals do. Experiments with humans and chimpanzees indicate that the whites of the eyes enable both humans and chimpanzees to better determine the gaze direction of humans than that of chimpanzees.

The bottom line is that humans have more white in their eyes, giving our eyes greater contrast that draws attention to where we are looking, helps us communicate, helps infants learn language terms, helps us determine the status of someone’s health, and helps us to bond with someone we care about. We can be thankful that God has given humans this exceptional gift, but it may not have been an important factor in helping the Americans win the Revolutionary War.

Reference: popsci.com

June 18, 2026June 17, 2026

Two Nostrils Are Better Than One

Have you ever thought about why you have two nostrils? When you need to take in more air during strenuous exercise, mouth breathing becomes necessary. But breathing through your nose is much better than breathing through your mouth for various reasons. When I have had a cold or allergy and one nostril was plugged, the other still worked, at least partially. That could be the reason for two nostrils. But that’s not the whole story of why two nostrils are better than one.

It may be a surprise to you, as it was to me, that even when your nostrils are not plugged, one of them will always draw in more air than the other. They trade off every few hours. Your nostrils prepare the air for your lungs by warming it and adding moisture. When the nostril that has been passing most of the air becomes dry, the other can take over while the first one recovers moisture.

A second reason two nostrils are better than one is more efficient fragrance detection. We detect smells when odorant molecules dissolve in the nasal mucus, where they bind to neurons that send signals to the brain. Some chemicals are quickly absorbed, while others are absorbed more slowly. The nostril with faster airflow will detect odor chemicals that dissolve quickly, while the nostril with slower airflow will have time to detect slow-dissolving chemicals. The brain combines the two fragrances to give us a more complete picture of the environmental smells.

Perhaps another reason two nostrils are better than one is that they help detect the direction smells are coming from. Our ears on opposite sides of our heads can give us information about the direction of sound. Our brains combine the vision from our two eyes to give us a three-dimensional view of the world around us. Even though the nostrils are not as far apart as our ears and eyes, they can still give us a clue to determine the origin of a smell.

Your nostrils contain hairs that filter out some of the dust and pollutants in the air. That is another advantage over mouth breathing. One more thing that comes to mind is that having two nostrils allows a ridge of cartilage to form between them, giving your nose its distinctive shape. (Although you may not think that the shape of your nose is advantageous.) Overall, I have to admit that two nostrils are better than one. I am glad the Creator made that part of the body’s marvelous design.

Reference: popsci.com

June 16, 2026June 14, 2026

To Improve the Safety of Self-Driving Cars

Human eyes have a remarkable ability to adjust quickly to changes in light intensity. That is especially important when driving at night. When bright headlights from an oncoming vehicle shine into our eyes, we must be able to continue to see the road and any possible pedestrian or deer crossing in front of us. This requires our eyes to adjust very quickly. God has designed human eyes with an amazing ability to adjust quickly to changes in light. Inspired by the human eye’s design, researchers at Penn State University have engineered a “photomemristor” to improve the safety of self-driving cars.

Human eyes have a combination of rods and cones. The rods work well in dim light, and the cones work well in bright light. Together, they enable us to adjust quickly to changing light conditions. Typical photocells can’t handle the wide range of light intensities required in some driving situations, especially at night. The Penn State researchers have designed a device that can “dynamically adapt to changing light conditions.” The newly designed photomemristor is a bio-inspired device that uses water, a gel-like plastic, and titanium oxide.

Many times, we have seen innovations that involve biomimicry, imitating the design God has used in the natural world. Visual perception is an essential human capability. Over 80% of the information we receive about our external environment comes through our vision. To improve the safety of self-driving cars, or robots that perform various duties, requires learning from God’s design of vision.

References: nature.com and popsci.com

May 29, 2026May 27, 2026

Intelligent or Unintelligent?

Causes can be of two types: intelligent or unintelligent. As we look for what caused the universe to come into existence or what caused life to appear on this planet, we should ask whether it was an intelligent cause or an unintelligent one, meaning chance. When you see the Grand Canyon, you can conclude that it was the result of natural forces and therefore not a direct intelligent cause. When you see Mount Rushmore, the mountain itself can be attributed to natural causes, but the faces of four presidents carved into that mountain testify to an intelligent cause.

Darwinists agree that the living things we see around us appear to be designed. But those who reject intelligent causation for living things have to keep reminding themselves that what they’re seeing was not designed by an Intelligence, but rather merely happened by chance. Is that attitude intelligent or unintelligent?

The complexity of DNA is certainly a challenge to those who believe that life happened by chance. However, they also have to contend with the fact that DNA relies on proteins for its structure, while proteins require DNA to provide the instructions for how they are to be constructed and folded. Since each requires the other, which comes first: proteins or DNA?

Spontaneous generation of life from non-life was advocated by Aristotle and accepted by science for 2,000 years until Louis Pasteur disproved it. However, those who believe that life came into being without guiding intelligence from purely natural chemicals must accept the concept of spontaneous generation, even though it is not supported by any empirical observation. Francis Crick, an atheist and co-discoverer of the DNA molecule’s structure, said, “Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.”

Other scientists, such as Fred Hoyle, recognizing the problem of life’s origin, have proposed panspermia (“seeds everywhere”). That idea suggests that life on Earth was seeded by aliens from another star system. Besides having zero evidence for such a thing, it doesn’t explain where the interstellar life came from, stretches the imagination, and requires a great deal of blind faith. When scientists and others stick to their belief in spontaneous generation or panspermia, is that intelligent or unintelligent?

Physicist and information scientist Hubert Yockey, realizing the difficulty of explaining intelligent life without an intelligent cause, wrote, “The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.” The faith of those who refuse to believe in intelligent design is not based on scientific evidence but on ideological bias. Do you think that believing in creation without a Creator is intelligent or unintelligent?

May 26, 2026May 24, 2026

A Neatly Arranged Tree of Life

According to the Darwinian concept, gradual changes over long periods lead to the development of new traits. The Darwinian tree of life displays branches leading to diverse life forms. Along each branch, we see new traits emerging and then being further developed in subsequent generations of creatures. That means similar traits indicate common ancestry. Over billions of years, the result should be a tree, with each branch showing an obvious progression of similar traits. A neatly arranged tree of life should be the result. However, that is not the case.

Convergent evolution throws the tree into disorder. Scientists use the term “convergent evolution” to explain similar characteristics appearing on different branches of the tree. Those similarities show up not only in obvious physical traits but even at the genetic level. According to the common understanding of the evolutionary tree, a trait should appear in a branch and then be carried forward, further developed, or even lost in the succeeding branches or twigs. For a neatly arranged tree of life, the same trait should not appear in other, unrelated branches.

According to Richard Dawkins, “It is vanishingly improbable that exactly the same evolutionary pathway should ever be traveled twice.” In other words, it is unlikely that evolution would cause the same trait to appear multiple times in different evolutionary lines. That is, two separate branches of the tree should not be marked by the appearance of the same evolved trait.

However, in many instances, the same trait shows up in animals or plants that are not closely related. In other words, the same evolutionary change occurred independently many times. According to a paper published April 30, 2026, by Yacine Ben Chehida and others in the journal PLOS Biology, “Convergent evolution, the repeated evolution of similar phenotypes, is widespread in nature.” (Phenotypes are the sets of observable characteristics or traits of an organism.)

Who is correct, Richard Dawkins or the paper in PLOS Biology? How can it be “vanishingly improbable” and yet “widespread in nature?” Furthermore, Simon Conway Morris, who has held the Chair of Evolutionary Paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge for more than 30 years, said, “Convergence is ubiquitous.” If by ubiquitous he means present anywhere and everywhere, how can unguided evolution explain that? How can something be “vanishingly improbable” and “ubiquitous” at the same time?

Since a neatly arranged tree of life does not seem to exist, perhaps the existence of a common creator God has more explanatory power than mere chance evolution. For more examples of convergent evolution, read our posts HERE and HERE.

References: scienceandculture.com and journals.plos.org

May 15, 2026May 14, 2026

The Creativity of Chance

I’m sitting by my window, looking out at the beautiful trees, green grass, flowers, birds, groundhog, and squirrels, and I’m thinking about Darwinism. According to Darwinism, all living things have evolved from a common ancestor, a single-celled creature about four billion years ago. I’m thinking that it takes a lot of faith to believe in the creativity of chance.

People often cite similarities among living things as evidence that all life originated from a single common ancestor. In their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Norman Geisler and Frank Turek consider how much faith it takes to be a Darwinist. To believe in Darwinism, you must be able to explain the dissimilarity among living things. I think that may be more difficult than explaining the similarities.

Think about the variation among the millions of life forms. Geisler and Turek point out that if you believe in Darwinism, you must explain the dissimilarity between “the palm tree, the peacock, the octopus, the locust, the bat, the hippopotamus, the porcupine, the sea horse, the Venus flytrap, the human, and mildew.” The question is, how could those and all other species have descended from the first unicellular life by mere chance and without intelligent intervention?

As you ponder that, you must also realize that if you’re going to leave God out of the picture, how did nonliving chemicals organize into that original single-celled organism from which all life sprang into being? Furthermore, how can you explain the existence of the fine-tuned universe that makes life, and especially advanced life, possible? Could chance and time have created all of this, or does it require an intelligent Designer? Believing in the creativity of chance takes more faith than I have.

May 13, 2026May 11, 2026

Yawning is Good for Your Health

A new scientific study defines yawning as “a stereotyped orofacial-respiratory behavior characterized by a prolonged jaw gape and coordinated oropharyngeal movements.” We know what yawning is, and we know it can be impolite to yawn while listening to someone speak or perhaps during a sermon. But maybe yawning is good for your health, according to this new study.

Yawning is not confined to humans—mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and other vertebrates also yawn. We think of yawning as accompanied by taking a deep breath, but even marine mammals, including beluga whales, bottlenose dolphins, and dugongs, display a similar action, gaping their mouths even when they’re underwater so they can’t breathe. Yawning must be good for something.

According to the scientific report, most yawns appear to consist of an initial deep inspiration, a pause, and then a rapid expiration. It was suggested that yawning may play a role in regulating blood oxygen levels, brain thermoregulation, or attention/arousal. According to the study, it may also have something to do with cerebral metabolic waste clearance. In other words, it helps clear your brain, so yawning is good for your health.

The movement of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) contributes to waste removal in the brain. So, if CSF movement is critical to remove metabolic waste from the brain, how does yawning help with that movement? That was what the group’s research sought to find. They said, “The movement of the jaw and the act of inhaling can impact circulation within the skull.”

Furthermore, yawns may be coordinated by a brainstem central pattern generator (CPG), similar to those that control breathing and locomotion. Swallowing is also organized by CPG circuitry, and the researchers found that swallowing is often tied to yawning, since swallowing frequently occurs within seconds after a yawn.

The bottom line, as far as I can understand, is that yawning is good for your health because it helps clear the brain of waste materials. I presume that means when your brain is busy thinking, a yawn becomes necessary to clear out the waste and give room for your brain to keep on thinking. Perhaps if you’re yawning while reading the posts we present on this web page, we are stimulating your brain rather than putting you to sleep. If that is true, I am encouraged because while writing this, I found myself yawning.

I never cease to be amazed at the complexity of life and the human body that God designed, and yawning is just one more thing that amazes me.

Reference: sciencedirect.com

May 12, 2026May 11, 2026

The Thymus Has an Essential Purpose

A mysterious organ of the human body lies behind the sternum (breastbone) and in front of the heart. It’s called the thymus. Almost 2000 years ago, the Greek physician and surgeon Galen of Pergamon called it the “seat of the soul.” However, as recently as 1961, Nobel Prize-winning British biologist Sir Peter Medawar called the thymus the graveyard for dying cells and “an evolutionary accident of no very great significance.” Today, scientists know that the thymus has an essential purpose in establishing the immune system during childhood and continues to be beneficial throughout life. Since the thymus has been known for thousands of years, why did it take so long for science to discover that it has a purpose?

Recent research at Massachusetts General Hospital has shown the role the thymus plays in a person’s health. It helps regulate aging and immune health. It appears to play a crucial role in a person’s longevity, protecting against cancer, autoimmune disease, and even cardiovascular risks. Medical scientists have found that people with healthier thymuses are less likely to develop lung cancer or die of heart disease or other causes.

The thymus has sometimes been removed because it can get in the way of heart or chest surgery, and the removal is called a thymectomy. In the past, thymectomy was not considered a problem because people seemed to get along very well without the thymus. The research team found that people receiving a thymectomy were more likely to die of any cause within five years than people with a healthy thymus. People without a thymus were twice as likely to develop cancer and were also more likely to develop autoimmune disease.

The thymus has an essential purpose and is not a vestigial organ, as some have thought in the past. It is not a mistake of evolution. A healthy thymus is a predictor of good health in many respects. People with healthy thymuses are less likely to develop lung cancer or die of heart disease. They are also more likely to respond positively to cancer drugs. The research has led to interest in finding ways to slow the thymus’s natural deterioration, which occurs in adulthood.

Too often, we have been led to believe that something is a vestigial organ, leftover from the process of evolution, when, in fact, it plays a role in our health. (For example, tonsils, appendix, and so-called “junk DNA.”) Looking at medical research from an evolutionary viewpoint can sometimes lead to neglect of important health issues. If we believe our bodies are intelligently designed rather than merely accidents of evolution, we have a reason to look for that design. The thymus has an essential purpose because God designed it that way, but science overlooked it for way too long.

References: washingtonpost.com, and New England Journal of Medicine HERE and HERE

May 8, 2026May 4, 2026

Creating a Smell Map

It is easy to overlook the importance of the sense of smell. Smell affects human health and safety. The sense of smell plays an essential role in the taste of food. It can also warn us of spoiled or unsafe food by its rancid odor. Smell can give pleasure, as with the fragrance of flowers, or make us nauseated, as when we smell a foul odor. Fragrances can bring back pleasant memories. The loss of smell can cause depression. With those things in mind, researchers are creating a smell map.

Maps of the receptors for vision, hearing, and touch have been developed previously, but this research was the first to create a detailed map of the receptors for smell. The research began by studying the smell receptors in mice. The challenge in creating a smell map is that it is more complex than the other senses. There are only three main receptor types needed for color vision, but mice have 20 million olfactory neurons and more than 1,000 types of odor receptors that detect unique subsets of odor molecules.

Before creating a smell map, the prevailing theory was that the smell receptors were randomly placed. The study showed that smell receptors form horizontal stripes from the top of the nose to the bottom, and the order matches the brain’s olfactory bulb. Further study will explore human olfactory receptors to compare them with those in mice.

This research is important because it will help scientists develop therapies for people who have lost their sense of smell, as has sometimes been the case with COVID-19. As we learn more about how the sense of smell works, we see evidence of design. The bottom line is that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14). The design of life, and especially the human body, shows evidence of a Designer, not random chance.

Reference: Harvard Medical School hms.harvard.edu

May 6, 2026May 4, 2026

Spoken Language and Linguistics

Animals communicate with each other in various ways, including sounds, movements, colors, odors, and more. Humans are the only creatures God has created that use spoken language. Many scholars have studied language in the field of linguistics. Noam Chomsky is an American linguist who has been called “the father of modern linguistics.” Chomsky is a controversial figure because of his political and atheistic radicalism, but his credentials in linguistics are widely recognized.

Chomsky insists that the principles of language structure are biologically present in the human brain and are genetically inherited from birth. He believes that knowledge of syntax is at least partially inborn and that children need only learn the specific features of the language they are exposed to in their native culture. Thus, Chomsky maintains that there is an innate linguistic capacity in every human, enabling language-based communication in ways no other creature can.

Some animals, such as parrots, can imitate spoken language, but they are just imitating sounds. They are not capable of understanding syntax or communicating in human language. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer has said, “Every single human language has this complexity and suppleness of expression, all the tenses and the declensions and so forth. This was Chomsky’s mantra: There are technologically primitive cultures, but there are no primitive languages. And how you get from what the primates do to what we do is a complete mystery.”

In Genesis 1:28, we find God telling the first couple to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” It seems they failed to do so, since at the time of the flood they were still confined to a limited area of the planet that God covered with water. Then, when Noah’s family emerged from the ark, God repeated his command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Again, they failed to do so because they still lived in a limited area, and, working together, they contrived to build a tower to reach heaven against God’s wishes.

It was then that God gave them different languages: “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8). They still had that sophisticated inborn language ability, but they could no longer understand one another or work together to accomplish the project they were attempting. That action of God finally caused them to spread over the Earth. In the genealogies of Genesis 10:25, we read an interesting note. It says that in the days of Peleg, “the earth was divided.” Could that refer to the time when the land bridge between Asia and North America became covered with water, so the people who had migrated to the Western Hemisphere could no longer travel back to the east? The land bridge was no longer needed.

Today, of course, we are scattered over the Earth, but our ability to communicate with one another through spoken language has increased to the point where we can instantly talk with people around the world. Even in cases where we don’t speak the same language, computers and even handheld devices can translate our words into another language. We have today the ability to use language to accomplish prideful things, similar to the people in Babel attempting to build the tower. Or we can use our ability to communicate with one another to achieve peace and bring the message of salvation through Jesus Christ to people all over the world. I pray that we will make the right choice.

References: scienceandculture.com and wikipedia.com