The God of the Bible says he formed the first human body “out of the dust of the ground” and this concept of human creation is repeated in other ancient writings. Whether he is saying he took natural elements and bioengineered the first man or actually made a model out of mud is a logical question. Evidence shows that the Elohiym has the technology, but the specifics of creation of living things are not detailed. The solid evidence of a perfect method of producing perfect creatures living in perfect biospheres is in the results.
The human body is the finest multifaceted organism in the natural world. When coupled with the most complicated and sophisticated central processing unit ever devised, the human brain, it stands alone as the quintessence of living entities.
· The Brain
The human brain is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe. It controls over 100 billion nerve cells and generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all of the world’s telephones put together moving at speeds from 150 to 250 miles per hour. This network uses nearly 45 miles of nerves that are powered by more bioelectricity than produced by a 120-volt battery. At least 100,000 different chemical reactions occur in the brain every second. The number of possible different combinations of synaptic connections among neurons in a single human brain is larger than the total number of atomic particles that make up the known universe. The storage capacity is estimated to exceed 4 terabytes. It can store, recognize and remember 10,000 different odors and differentiate between up to eight million colors and 500 shades of gray. It is estimated that there are between 100 and 200 hundred billion neurons in a brain and seven million brain cells are used each day. A newly formed nerve cell is called a neuroblast.
The brain reaches its maximum weight, three pounds, at age 20 but begins to lose cells at a rate of 50,000 per day by the age of 30. A baby’s brain has its full complement of neurons by the sixth month of gestation and grows at a rate of more than 13,000 neurons per second up until this time. The soft mass of the adult brain is motionless but is surrounded by a membrane containing veins and arteries. The brain itself has no feeling, therefore, the pain of a headache comes not from the organ itself, but from the nerve and muscles lining it. The brain is composed of 85% water and on average comprises 2 percent of the total body weight, yet it requires 25 percent of all oxygen used, as opposed to 7 percent by the heart. Cholesterol makes up 15 percent of the brain by dry weight. The brain is more active sleeping than it is watching TV.
The short-term memory capacity for most people is between five and nine items or digits. This is one reason that phone numbers were kept to seven digits. A recent study found that 75 percent of headache patients felt relief when they rubbed capsaicin (the component that makes chili peppers hot) on their nose. A bowl of lime Jell-O, when hooked up to an EEG machine, exhibits activity, which is virtually identical to the brain waves of a healthy adult man or woman. Thomas Edison said, “The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around”, however Aristotle believed the main purpose of the human brain was to cool the blood. Even after death, the human brain continues to produce electrical wave signals for up to a day and a half
· The Heart
The heart of an adult beats about 70 to 80 beats per minute, 100,000 times every day, 40 million times a year and in 70 years it will have beaten 2˝ billion times. A female heart beats about 10 times per minute faster than a male’s. The rate can increase to as much as 200 per minute during heavy exercise. As a pump it produces enough pressure to shoot a stream 30 feet, produce enough energy in an hour to lift 2000 lb. 3 feet off the ground, and efficiently circulate 50 million gallons over the average lifetime. In one year, the average human heart circulates from 770,000 to 1.6 million gallons of blood through the body. This is enough fluid to fill 200 tank cars, each with a capacity of 8,000 gallons. There are enough tiny blood vessels called capillaries that if placed end to end they would stretch over 2 times around the earth. All this is done with just over a gallon of blood which circulates 1,000 times in a single day through the body on a daily 60,000-mile journey, 168,000,000 miles in a lifetime. 25 trillion cells travel through the bloodstream, but a stack of 500 would only measure 0.04 inches high. The human heart rests between beats. In an average lifetime of 70 years, the total resting time is estimated to be about 40 years.
Red blood cells live for a period of only four months and travel between the lungs and other tissues 75,000 times before returning to the bone marrow to die, being replaced by the bone marrow at the rate of 2 to 3 million a second. Men have more blood, 1.5 gallons as compared to 0.875 gallons for women. The most common blood type in the world is Type O accounting for about 46% of the world’s population. However, in some areas, other blood groups predominate. The most rare, Type A-H, has been found in less than a dozen people since the type was discovered. According to research, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week. A child has 60,000 miles of blood vessels, in an adult there are 100,000. The stethoscope was invented so that doctors could listen to a woman’s heart without having to touch her. The native people of the Andes Mountains in South America have 2 to 3 more quarts of blood in their bodies than people who live at lower elevations.
· The Eyes
As you focus on each word in this sentence, your eyes swing back and forth 100 times a second, and every second the retina performs 10 billion computer-like calculations. The eyes can perceive more than 1 million simultaneous visual impressions, are able to discriminate among nearly 8 million gradations of color, can distinguish about 500 different shades of gray, and take in more information than the world’s largest telescope. Each time the eye blinks, over 200 muscles move and you blink 25 times a minute or over 6 million times each year. The retina inside the eye covers about 650 square millimeters and contains some 137 million light-sensitive cells; 130 million rod cells for black and white vision and 7 million cone cells for color vision. To focus all this, the muscles of the eye move 100,000 times a day. An eye weighs 1.25 ounces. By the age of 60, our eyes have been exposed to more light energy than would be released by a nuclear blast. Sight accounts for 90 to 95 percent of all sensory perceptions.
The human eye sees everything upside down, but the brain turns it right side up, with an average field of vision encompassing a 200-degree wide angle. Your ears and nose continue to grow throughout your entire life but your eyes are the same size from birth to death. A bird’s eye takes up about 50 percent of its head; human eyes take up about 5 percent of the head. To be comparable to a bird’s eyes, human eyes would have to be the size of baseballs. If you go blind in one eye, you’ll loose only one-fifth of your vision, but lose all your depth perception. The only part of the human body that has no blood supply is the cornea; it takes its oxygen directly from the air.
Newborn babies are not blind but have approximately 20/50 vision and can easily discriminate between degrees of brightness. The daughters of a mother who is colorblind and a father who has normal vision will have normal vision. However, the sons will be colorblind. While 7 men in 100 have some form of colorblindness, only 1 woman in 1,000 suffers from it. The most common form of color blindness is a red-green deficiency. People are the only animals in the world who cry tears. Onion Tears are caused by an irritant in onions known as brominates molecules which react with the water on the eye to produces an acid which the eye removes by producing tears. Those stars and colors you see when you close and rub your eyes are called phosphenes.
Two out of three adults in the United Sates wear glasses at some time. While reading a page of print, the eyes do not move continually across the page. They move in a series of jumps, called “fixations,” from one clump of words to the next. Though more comfortable with daylight, given enough time to adjust, the human eye can, for a time, see almost as well as an owl’s. The sensitivity of the human eye is so keen that on a clear, moonless night, a person standing on a mountain can see a match being struck as far as 50 miles away. Much to their amazement, astronauts in orbit were able to see the wakes of ships. When you have a black eye, you have a bilateral periorbital hematoma. The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing.
· The Ears
Our hearing is so sensitive it can distinguish between hundreds of thousands of different sounds. Between ages 30 and 70, the ears may be a quarter-inch longer due to the fact that cartilage is one of the few tissues that continue to grow as we age. A human can hear the tick of a watch from 6 meters in very quiet conditions. Sounds too low for human beings to hear are called infrasonic. The easiest sound for the human ear to hear, and those which carry best when pronounced, are, in order, “ah,” “aw,” “eh,” and “oo.” Permanent hearing loss can result from prolonged exposure to sounds at 85 decibels (0 decibels is the threshold for hearing). For comparison, a busy street corner is about 80 decibels, a subway train from 20 feet is 100 decibels, a jet plane from 500 feet is 110 decibels, and loud thunder is 120 decibels. A rock band amplified at close range is 140 decibels, more than 100,000 times as loud as the level that will produce permanent hearing loss. The African bushman lives in a quiet, remote environment and has no measurable hearing loss at age 60.
· The Nose
The nose cleans, warms or cools, filters, and humidifies over 500 cubic feet of air every day. It monitors and classifies over 10,000 different odors and the sense of smell is so keen that it can detect the odors of certain substances even when they are diluted to 1 part to 30 billion. A human can detect one drop of perfume diffused throughout a three-room apartment. It is totally impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph and when you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, even the heart. Most people by the age of sixty have lost 40 percent of their ability to smell. Your thumb is the same length as your nose.
· The Mouth
The average human has about 10,000 taste buds. Those on the tongue are divided into four groups; the tip taste buds sense sweetness; those at the back sense bitterness; the sides sense saltiness and sourness. All the more complex tastes are made up of combinations of the basic four. However, not all taste buds are on the tongue. Some are under the tongue; some are on the inside of the cheeks; some are on the roof of the mouth. Some can even be found on the lips, which are especially sensitive to salt. The sense of taste can detect sweetness in a solution of 1 part sugar to 200 parts water and one gram of salt in 500 liters of water. The average lifespan of a human being’s taste bud is 7-10 days. By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue and every person has a unique tongue print. Pigs, dogs, and some other animals can taste water, but people cannot. Humans don’t actually taste water; they taste the chemicals and impurities in the water. 85% of the population can curl their tongue into a tube.
The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself and tooth enamel is the hardest of all substances manufactured by the human body. Each tooth contains about 55 miles of canals for a total of over 1700 miles. There are 20 baby teeth and 32 adult teeth. False teeth are often radioactive. Approximately 1 million Americans wear some form of denture; half of these dentures are made of a porcelain compound laced with minute amounts of uranium to stimulate fluorescence. Without the uranium additive, the dentures would be a dull green color when seen under artificial light. If you are right-handed, you will tend to chew your food on the right side of the mouth. If you are left-handed, you will tend to chew your food on the left. A pack-a-day smoker will loose approximately 2 teeth every 10 years.
It requires the use of 72 muscles to speak a single word. Whispering is more wearing on your voice than a normal speaking tone. Whispering and shouting stretch the vocal cords. A normal person has two true vocal chords and two false vocal chords, which have no direct role in producing sound. The mouth makes one liter of saliva a day and over a lifetime producesenough to fill two swimming pools. Every time you lick a stamp, you’re consuming 1/10 of a calorie. Up to the age of six or seven months, a child can breathe and swallow at the same time. An adult cannot do this. Seeing another person yawn makes it likely that you will yawn yourself. Thinking about, even reading about yawning, can cause a yawn.