What Makes Me Tick?
A study of the human body, and what I found.
Part 1 – What Prompted Me to Look
Over the years I have learned much from reading books and writings from authors of different worldviews. Recently I read a book by a neuroscientist who integrated scientific naturalism with neurotheology.
Neurotheology was new to me. Neurotheology is a belief system that claims mankind's ubiquitous sense of spiritual and religious experiences is simply a neurological result of the brain's activities. I have some thoughts about this field, but here, I would like to share some discoveries that this book set in motion.
In his book, the author was describing an animal, and he wrote that his worldview demanded that there be a useful function for the animal's pre-stage (pre-developed) wing. Acknowledging that a wing is a very intricate multi-component device, he explained that before this pre-stage wing had mutated to the point of being able to fly, it must have had a useful function. He then hypothesized that this pre-stage wing must have been a sort of venting flap to cool the animal before it, by chance, became capable of sustaining flight.
This really caused me to pause; I have watched engineering documentaries on man's journey to flight. Engineering the components for sustained flight has been an arduous journey for inventors, with many tests and failures, in-depth mathematical modeling, and analysis of many animals' wing designs and wing movements. (Each flying animal has a detailed wing design with a specific patterned wing movement which together sustains its particular body in flight.) The complexity involved in flight, from biological creatures to manmade engineered objects, requires specific coordination of a lift structure with a movement pattern, or a lift structure with a separate mechanism for propulsion.
The author's comment of a venting flap unintentionally becoming an instrument of flight really stood out to me. It's very difficult for me to imagine the development of an intricate wing whose shape, size, flexibility, and patterned motion yields the event of flight, when its pre-flight precursor steps were not aimed at the outcome of flight. Flight was just an unintended result. Man's experiments with making sustained flight have demonstrated that flight is not so easily stumbled upon.
My interest in complex design was now stirred. I began a journey into learning about the molecular biology of the human body. Though molecular biology is very detailed, I have found a dive into the specifics was not only intriguing, but also critically necessary to have an understanding of biology and an understanding of ourselves.
In Parts 2-10, I have introduced several components and systems of the human body. Part 2 is the most detailed including the specifics of one chemical pathway in order to introduce an example of molecular chemistry. In the following sections, the effects of the pathways are discussed, without as much detail into the actual chemical names. Links are provided so the reader can further investigate the specific molecules involved in the processes.
I believe the molecular chemistry of the body is worth investigating as I later found that these biological details are quite integral and pertinent in considering worldview questions.