Biology

Garfield, Puss in Boots, Aristocats' Toulouse – cultural icons maybe, but most certainly orange. Scientists across two continents have made a breakthrough in understanding the genetics behind the distinctive orange coloration in cats. They discovered that orange cats are missing a section of their genetic code, which means the cells responsible for their skin, eye and fur tone produce lighter colors.

Male cats have an X and a Y chromosome, and if the gene for fur color on their single X chromosome codes for orange, they'll be fully orange. Female cats have two X chromosomes, so they need that orange gene on both X chromosomes to be fully orange; otherwise, they're more likely to have mixed colors.

This finding not only solves a genetic puzzle but also opens doors for further research into feline genetics and pigmentation. Dr. Lisa Smith from Stanford remarked, “Understanding the genetic basis of coat color can help us learn more about gene regulation and inheritance.”

This breakthrough not only enriches our understanding of cats, one of the world’s most beloved pets, but also underscores the intricate relationship between genetics and appearance in animals.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Uniqueness is woven into the very DNA of creation—evidence of God’s intention, diversity, and creativity.

In the quiet fields of Jackson County, Michigan, something wild—and wildly unexpected—was caught on camera: a zedonk, the rare hybrid offspring of a zebra and a donkey. With the sturdy build of a donkey and the striking black-and-white stripes of a zebra only on its hindquarters and legs, this animal is turning heads and stirring up scientific curiosity.

The unusual creature first drew attention when local police received early morning calls about a donkey obstructing traffic. But when officers arrived at the scene, they realized it wasn’t just any donkey—it was a zedonk. Unlike a zonkey, which is the result of a zebra father and a donkey mother, a zedonk comes from a zebra mother and a donkey father. This distinction matters to biologists because the parentage can affect both appearance and behavior in hybrid offspring.

Officers found the animal had already wandered into a pasture just north of the reported location. It turned out the zedonk had escaped from a nearby farm known for breeding hybrid animals. Fortunately, authorities confirmed that there was no sign of mistreatment or neglect contributing to the escape.

"Occasional escapes are just part of livestock farming," Public Safety Director Darin McIntosh told local reporters.

The zedonk’s brief adventure was caught on film. A local resident’s home security camera recorded the hybrid calmly strolling near parked vehicles, giving locals and officials alike an up-close look at this striking anomaly of nature.

Police later confirmed that the zedonk was unharmed during its wanderings. The zedonk now stands as a living reminder that nature still has surprises in store—and sometimes, they come with stripes.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The appearance of a rare and unexpected zedonks reminds us that God’s creation can surprise us, and that He often uses the unusual to capture our attention and teach us. Creation, in its diversity, is meant to bring glory and praise to its Maker.

Most people believe that evolution provides an adequate account of human origins. But for substantial numbers around the world, that doesn’t preclude divine direction. A new survey spanning North America, South America, and Europe found that 13 to 29 percent of people believe in God-guided evolution.

People Who Say Humans Evolved in A Process Guided by God:

13% Germany

22% United Kingdom

25% Argentina

29% United States

Two Christian university professors had an unusual assignment for students over a long break. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon told their students while they were on school break to take a long, good look at their belly button. Why? They explain:

Nothing is quite as revealing as our belly button ... by noting that we are creatures, creations of mothers and fathers, the Bible tells us that we have life as a gift. We are begotten, not manufactured. Someone even changed our diapers; our first hint of what grace must be like. No wonder some of us resent our parents, for they are a visible, ever-present reminder that we were created, that the significance of our lives is not exclusively self-derived.

In contrast, it is all too easy in today's Western culture for us to imagine that we are self-made people. But your belly button does not merely remind you of Mom and Dad, but of your Creator and Redeemer, from whom you have life, meaning, and purpose.

Writing for The Atlantic, David Merritt Johns says that a most confounding story appeared in his inbox by a tipster who prefaced it by saying, “I’m sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this.”

Harvard doctoral research student Andres Korat found a curious result from a 2018 study: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. After consulting with his department chair, Korat set out to debunk his initial finding with more research, but it ended up being stubbornly consistent.

Korat wrote in his findings, “There are few plausible biological explanations for these results.” But he also mentioned several prior studies that found similar results. Mark Pereira is an epidemiologist who authored one of those prior studies. He said, “I still to this day don’t have an answer for it.”

In his deep dive into the story, Johns claims that several medical researchers ended up spinning their data into conclusions more readily acceptable to mainstream audiences. Instead of touting the health benefits of ice cream, they pivoted to yogurt. One research paper read: “Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not.”

“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, who co-authored the paper. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even with advances in medical knowledge and technology, the human body is complex and full of surprises. Only God understands it fully, and our best attempts are foolish compared to God's wisdom.

There seems to be a trend for artisanal products—coffee shops, bakeries, and the like. Some may not know what artisanal means, other than assuming it meant (in the case of the bakery) "misshapen and expensive." But it actually means "traditional" and "nonmechanically made." A person made it, not a machine. It may have some imperfections, but even those are proof of authenticity.

Similarly, we human beings are not the product of a factory or the process of copy-and-paste. Our distinctive physical individual­ity is intended. We have been made by the ultimate artisan. Our God has produced billions of human bodies, but we are not mass-produced. We've each been handcrafted with infinite care. David says we have been "knitted together" in our mother's womb. Now, even if you have never knitted a stitch of anything in your life, you have probably watched others. It is wonderfully hands-on with each and every stitch individually knit by hand.

Being handcrafted means none of us has come about by accident. Our body is not random or arbitrary. We may know people who were not planned by their parents, which is a sensitive issue indeed. They were an "accident," a surprise, and some who are aware of their origins can struggle with long-term relational insecurity.

But when it comes to God, no one is unplanned. Every one of us is the product of God's deliberate choice. However, many people there turn out to be in the whole of human history, not one of them will have been an accident.

The Bible doesn't just affirm that we are all, in some way, the result of God's work. It says much more than that. We are the product of God's intention. He purposed our bodies. They are what he intended them to be. We can affirm, as David does, even of these imperfect bodies, that God made them as he intended.

Sam Allberry writes in his most recent book:

I’ve recently been setting up a new home and therefore spending more time than I would ever choose trying to assemble furniture. If I never see another Allen key for the rest of my life, I will be a very happy man. Needless to say, the results have not been uniformly impressive. The best appraisal I can give myself at the end of a sweaty day is, "That'll just have to do." And when you're talking about a bed that you'll be spending around a third of your life lying on, "that'll have to do" is not great. I already seem to have done my back in as a result of it.

With God it is very different. There is a rhythm to the account of creation in Genesis 1. The work takes place over six days, with a repeated refrain: "God saw that it was good." God is evidently not inattentive to what he is making. He doesn't start one aspect of creation and then turn his attention to the next project. He finishes each act, steps back (as it were) and appraises it. As he assesses each day's work of creation, he is fully pleased with the outcome. So again and again we read, "It was good," "It was good," "It was good."

That is, until we turn up. At the end of the day when God has made humanity in his image, male and female, he says something different: "It was very good" (Gen. 1:31). The difference male and female image bearers makes to his creation is to lift it from "good" to "very good." Needless to say, it is not a track record we maintain through the rest of the Bible; but the fact remains, there is a deep fundamental very-goodness to the way God has designed us to be, and our being made as men and women is at the heart of it.

Science has come very far in understanding how the human body works. But scientists admit understanding the human brain is still in its pioneering stage. God’s marvelous creation is still a mystery. The ultimate question in neuroscience is: How does the brain work?

Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. ... But we don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory.

Stanford neurologist Charisse Lichtman, offers a picture to clarify the problem:

But if I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”

Cosmos: Possible Worlds is a sequel to Carl Sagan’s 1980 acclaimed TV series Cosmos. It is hosted by astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson. In the episode, “The Cosmic Connectome,” Tyson delves into the marvels of the human brain and explores the possibility of a wonderful cerebral connection between man and the universe.

Tyson narrates:

Can we know the universe? Are our brains capable of comprehending the cosmos in all of its complexity and splendor? We don't yet know the answer to that question because our brain remains almost as much of a mystery as the universe itself. We think that the number of processing units in your brain is roughly equal to all the stars in 1,000 galaxies. At least 100 trillion. And it's possible that the real number of processing units is ten times larger. ... If all the contents of your brain were transcribed into written language, it would amount to vastly more books than are contained in the largest libraries on earth. The equivalent of more than four billion books are inside your head. The brain is a very big place in a very small space.

Just as biologists succeeded in mapping the human genome, neuroscientists are attempting to map something far more complex and unique to each and every one of us. It's called our connectome. If we could truly know another person's connectome, the singular wiring diagram of all their memories, thoughts, fears, dreams. How would we treat each other? Could we heal the brain of its countless torments?

Possible Preaching Angle:

Although Neil deGrasse Tyson professes to be agnostic, his description of the human brain does highlight the epitome of God’s work of creation (Psa. 8:1-9).

When Sarah Sallon moved back home to Israel, to her job at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, she went looking for medicinal plants which had helped her during a previous illness. And she found lots of them. But she also heard about ancient medicinal plants that had disappeared.

She said, “They're just historical ghosts. Like the famous date plantations along the Dead Sea, 2,000 years ago—described by Pliny; described by Josephus, the first-century historian. They're not there anymore. They just vanished!”

But Sallon realized that seeds from those trees still existed. They'd been recovered from archaeological sites. So, she went to the archaeologists and proposed planting some of those seeds, to see if they'd grow again. It didn't go well at first. She said, “They thought I was mad! They didn't think that this was even conceivable.”

But she kept pushing, and eventually persuaded a few of them to provide some seeds to try this. More than a decade ago, she planted some of these ancient palm seeds. Six weeks later, little green shoots appeared!

Sallon and her colleagues recently announced in the journal Science Advances that they'd grown another six trees from some of those ancient seeds. No wonder God’s Word is likened unto an imperishable seed.

In his book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson takes readers on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human anatomy. Starting from the outside and moving in, Bryson begins by describing the largest organ of the human body, the skin. His description is telling:

The skin consists of an inner layer called the dermis and an outer epidermis. The outermost surface of the epidermis is made up entirely of dead cells. It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers.

He then concludes:

These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

Did you know that of our five sensory inputs (seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching), 80 percent of what your brain “knows” comes from your vision? This fact led A. M. Skeffington, a famous American optometrist, to say, “If a person cannot see 100%, they cannot be 100%.” Your brain is continually working to decipher and direct your body movement as your eyes perceive what is right in front of you.

A significant insight about eyesight hit me one day watching my wife paint a watercolor landscape. While she was turning some random pigments on her palette into a beautiful autumn forest, I realized that the landscape she was painting had three horizons. After a little digging, I learned that artists refer to these as the background, midground, and foreground planes of the painting. In fact, a landscape painting without one of these horizons becomes much less interesting. Why? Because it would fail to engage our depth perception and would be considered a dull work of art.

In a landscape painting, the background may be a blue sky, a beautiful sunset, or a mountain range. It's as far away as the eyes can see. Then there is usually a focal point of the piece in the midground that draws and keeps your focus, a deer, or a stream, or a tree in a field of wildflowers. Finally, you will notice that most painters create a further dimension by having an object in the foreground like a tree branch or the side of a house or a person. These objects are up close, right before our eyes. The artist must intentionally plan and design these three planes to simulate a peaceful or soul-stirring three-dimensional viewpoint.

In fact, the landscape painting simply reflects what is happening every moment your eyes are open. The ability for the human eye to focus in and out of distances is called “accommodation.” Your eyeball can zoom out and zoom in--say from looking at the sky, to looking at words on this page-in 350 milliseconds.

Christopher Hitchens, a devout man of the Left, and an outspoken atheist, must be pro-abortion, must fight for abortion just as he fights for all the other requisite social causes.

We don't know how Hitchens kept his two books, but there is no doubt he kept this lesson in his heart, just as there is no doubt he spent all his time around those who considered abortion a right, and hence were without any moral reservation about it. Christopher kept his very personal ledger on abortion closed to public view until rather late in his life. When, much to everyone's surprise … he stood up on the same moral side as the very religion, Christianity, he had made so lucrative a career in condemning.

He stated that, “I agree with this view for materialist reasons. It seems to me obvious from the discoveries of biology and embryology that the concept 'unborn child' is a real one. ... And it has to be granted to the Church that it has made this a centerpiece of its ethic and its morality.”

The human brain has been rightfully called the greatest arrangement of matter in the universe. This is no overstatement. The following are six primary reasons.

-The brain is mind-bogglingly efficient. For all the work it does, it only needs to be fueled by the equivalent energy of a 20-watt light bulb.

-Scientists have recently calculated that the brain’s main processing units – neurons – add up to at least 86 billion. Neurons help us control our bodies and think thoughts.

-The human brain contains 528,000 miles of nerve fibers. They transmit information to different neurons, muscles, and glands.

-Scientists estimate the human brain contains 2.5 petabytes of memory capacity. This is equivalent to the information stored at all US academic research libraries.

-The brain is not snoozing during sleep. “Once consciousness is lost, it gets to work on all manner of chores: clearing out toxic molecules, regulating hormone levels (and) also filing away experiences for later recall.

-And finally, the brain produces the miracle we call consciousness, which to this very day puzzles scientists about how it exactly does this.

The three smallest bones in the human body are the middle ear ossicles—the malleus, incus, and stapes—more commonly known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. "The hammer is arranged so that one end is attached to the eardrum, while the other end forms a lever-like hinge with the anvil. The opposite end of the anvil is fused with the stirrup (so anvil and stirrup act as one bone)."

Though the middle ear ossicles work in obscurity, completely invisible to the outside world, they are absolutely essential to our ability to hear. Without them, only 0.1 percent of the sound energy that hits the eardrum would be transferred to the inner ear. But because God has arranged these tiny parts in a way that maximizes their leverage, they produce a sonic effect far beyond their diminutive size.

Just as the human body has no insignificant parts, the body of Christ has no small or unimportant members. We all have a sphere of influence—however large or small, however visible or invisible—and we all have a vital role to play in God's plan for redeeming and restoring the world. We may be as well-hidden as a bone in the inner ear, an internal organ, or a foot inside a shoe, but every person is absolutely essential to the eternal purpose of God.

In his book Star Struck, Christian astronomer Dr. David H. Bradstreet writes:

Our planet is home to some 10 to 14 million species of living things. Consider the lowly dandelion. Found on all the Earth's continents, these tenacious plants seem to flourish anywhere and everywhere (particularly where fussy gardeners wish they wouldn't). Dandelion flower heads are perfectly designed for maximum seed creation and dispersal. Each yellow, flowering head can disperse 50 to 175 seeds to the winds. One single dandelion plant can create more than two thousand seeds.

Or consider the power of plants. A column in the New York Times hailed them for being "as close to biological miracles as a scientist could dare admit." As Douglas Tallamy writes, "After all, they allow us to eat sunlight … and plants also produce oxygen, build topsoil and hold it in place, prevent floods, sequester carbon dioxide, buffer extreme weather and clean our water."

Or consider the way God has made life thrive even in the deepest and darkest regions of the ocean floor, where no sunshine ever permeates the gloom. Strange plants grow 20,000 feet below the surface, surviving on chemical nutrients emerging from vents in the ocean floor.

It's this kind of mind-blowing biological diversity that I think about when I'm singing "For the Beauty of the Earth," one of my favorite hymns.

Your brain is about the size of a head of cauliflower. It looks and feels like a three and a half pound lump of firm tofu. It comprises about two percent of your body's mass, but it uses twenty-five per percent of the body's energy.

Scientists estimate that the brain receives 100 million bits of information per second and contains 100 billion cells, many of which are neurons. These cells have a thin, complicated shape like the branch of a tree. They can be as short as a millimeter or as long as a meter. At one end is the axon and at the other end are dendrites, the twigs on the branch. Neurons communicate with each other by sending chemical and electrical signals racing down the branch at 200 miles an hour. When the charge reaches the end of the cell it leaps the synapse—the space between the dendrite and the next twiggy branch. Each cell is surrounded by ten to 100,000 dendrites creating the possibility of one million billion synaptic connections—that's 10 followed by a million zeros! Compare that to the number of particles in the known universe—10 followed by 80 zeros.

You can see that the brain is complex if not unfathomable. Truly, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." Just ask your brain.

Science writer Hope Jahren shares an interesting fact about plants, especially how a tiny seed starts to put down roots—the most essential thing for a plant's survival. She writes,

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor … Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight.

She calls taking root a big "gamble," but if the seed takes root it can go down twelve, thirty, forty meters. The results are powerful. The tree's roots can "swell and split bedrock, and move gallons of water daily for years, much more efficiently than any pump yet invented by man." If the root takes root, then the plant becomes all but indestructible: "Tear apart everything aboveground—everything—and most plants can still grow rebelliously back from just one intact root. More than once. More than twice."

Possible Preaching Angles: In the same way, every Christian needs to put down his or her roots into the soil of Christ's love. Or we need to put down roots into the soil of relationships—with a church family or in a marriage.

In the dynamic relationship between love and knowledge, head and heart, the Scriptures paint a holistic picture of the human person. It's not only our minds that God redeems, but the whole person: head, heart, hands. Christ takes captive our minds but also our kardia, even what Paul calls our splagchna, our "inner parts" that are the seat of our "affections."

Contemporary science is starting to catch up to this ancient biblical wisdom about the human person. Scholars at UCLA and McMaster University have been conducting experiments that are shedding light on our "gut feelings." Their studies point to the way microbes in our stomachs affect the neural activity of the brain. "Your brain is not just another organ," they report. "It's … affected by what goes on in the rest of your body." In fact, Scientific American reports that there is "an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our 'second brain.'"

No wonder Jesus invites us to follow him by eating and drinking (John 6:53-58). Discipleship doesn't touch just our head or even just our heart; it reaches into our gut, our splagchna, our affections.

Editor's Note: For more info see also: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/18/244526773/gut-bacteria-might-guide-the-workings-of-our-minds. Or http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/."

Physician Horace Smith describes the importance of human blood:

Each drop of human blood contains over 5 million red cells … In an average lifetime, a person's red cells arranged in single file would reach from the earth to the sun and back five times!

Our bodies contain approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels … Through this delivery system, blood provides everything our cells need to live, and they take away waste that would poison us. At the cellular level, capillaries are so small that they are about the size of a single red blood cell … To connect with all the cells in the body, capillary walls cover an area of about 70,000 square feet … The circulatory system is the epitome of consistency. Every day, the heart beats 100,000 times, and over an average lifespan, this amazing machine beats 2.5 billion times, pumping 60 million gallons of blood. During this time, the heart never takes time off. We can't afford for it to take a break—even a few minutes without blood supply causes severe brain damage or death. Virtually all other cells in the human body are stationary, but blood is mobile tissue, carrying nutrients to every part of the body … protecting us from harm and healing our wounds.

No wonder the Old Testament says that "The life of every creature is its blood" (Lev. 17:14). Today, we understand the significance of this truth even more deeply. There are no cells in the human body that can live without continual contact with life-giving blood. Every type of cell, from the ones that survive only moments to those that live for many years, owes its life to the flow of blood. All three types of cells in human blood—red cells, white cells, and platelets—perform functions that are essential to life.