“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” Ps. 34:8 Have you ever wondered why we are able to taste things? Most reasoning goes that taste helped humans test food to determine if it was poisonous or inedible. Bitter or sour tastes indicated something potentially bad to eat. Sweet and salty tastes were signs of food rich in nutrients which would be good things to eat.

Yet scientists are discovering that our sense of taste is way more complicated than the 5 basic senses of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. First, our taste buds are complex organs with numerous sensory cells. These cells are connected to many different nerve fibers. When a chemical substance (food) enters the mouth, it comes in contact with the taste bud nerve cells and activates the cells that are wired to receive that specific chemical. The nerve cells then pass that information on to the brain so we can process and identify a specific flavor.

But there is more to the story.

Sugars, minerals, proteins, salts, and acids in foods are some of the trigger chemicals to get those taste buds firing! But most foods are made up of a combination of different tastes. Therefore, a specific flavor we might identify is really a combination of different sensations. And those sensations go beyond the tongue. They involve a whole symphony of senses, including smell, texture, and even temperature!

For example, things you might consider hot or spicy are not even direct taste sensations. They technically are pain signals sent by the touch and temperature-sensing nerves. So when you eat a super spicy taco, the nerves in your mouth are telling your brain you are in pain. If you LIKE spicy foods, your brain interprets that pain as enjoyable and fun! It’s kind of like the muscle pain we feel as we play a sport or work out.

Humans have a virtually limitless flavor palette. Half of your sensory cells and nerve fibers are specialized to react to only one taste, and they let the brain know the intensity of that taste. So far, scientists have been able to determine the brain can identify about 10 levels of intensity. That’s how you can identify whether something is a little salty or extremely salty!

The other half of your taste sensory cells are able to react to several of those 5 basic tastes, each having varying levels of sensitivity to the basic flavors. So a particular cell might be most sensitive to sweet, then sour, then salty and bitter, while another cell might be most sensitive to salty, then bitter, and so on.

You identify a complete flavor experience once all the sensory cell profiles from different parts of the tongue and mouth have been stimulated, sending their messages to the brain which combines the information and processes it.

So assuming the 5 basic tastes, 10 levels of intensity, and a huge number of taste-combination cells, there can be up to 100,000 different flavors that our brain can identify. Combine that with the senses of touch, temperature, and smell, and the numbers of flavors increase exponentially!

That goes well beyond the requirement for identifying if something is poisonous or good to eat. Why do we need to have such a rainbow of flavor combinations?

Well, tastes are very often associated with emotions. Think about the phrases “a bitter pill to take,” “sour grapes,” or “sweet nothings.” They all help us to express emotions of joy, pleasure, or sadness.

Science is finally helping us to see how our ability to taste works so we can better understand that connection, but the Psalmist who wrote the verse below already understood that:

“How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Ps. 119:103

Indeed, as we learn more about ourselves and the world around us, we get a clearer picture of how God created us. He gave us a vast organ system to be able to identify the myriad of flavors in the world, not only for us to know what is safe to eat, but also for us to be able to better express ourselves and communicate to each other how we feel.

One of the things I most like about studying our world is when those studies reveal a new idea that was not really new at all. A good example is the ocean currents of the world. You see, ancient sailors traveled along the coastlines for fishing and trade, but they rarely went too far from shore. Yet from their experience, they understood the oceans had predictable currents along those shores.When the Psalms were written, though, very little was known about what mysteries the great oceans held. But we read an interesting description in Psalm 8. Speaking of men, the Psalmist writes:

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

Did you catch that last phrase? The paths of the seas.

These verses caught the interest of Matthew Maury, a retired naval officer who worked in the Depot of Charts and Instruments office in the mid-1800s. He realized that, like rivers, there must be great currents of water moving throughout the oceans

With that in mind, he studied sea charts and log books, plotting the great Gulf Current that comes out of the Gulf of Mexico and pours into the Atlantic. This great “path” is 40 miles wide and 2,000 feet deep! Maury also identified the Japanese Current, California Current, and several others.

This information was valuable to the sailing ships of that century, enabling them to utilize those currents to move them across the oceans more efficiently.

Today, thanks to satellite imaging and more sophisticated devices, we are able to more accurately track ocean currents. I recently came across this amazing video showing the major known currents (paths) of the oceans throughout the world.

You can find it here: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/perpetual-ocean.html

Isn’t that fascinating?

Indeed, Matthew Maury is celebrated as the mind behind the discovery of the oceans and their movements. But Psalm 8:8 shows us that the Word of God is indeed timeless and filled with truth!

A face only a mother could love!

If most people were asked to draw a quick picture of a fish, they would likely draw a torpedo-shaped creature with some fins, an eye on either side of its head, and a mouth at the tip. And for the most part, they would have pretty accurate representation. But there are some fish species in the world that don’t fit into this general shape. Flatfish, like flounders and halibut, take the fish design world and turn it on its ear.

You see, when young flatfish hatch, they look like most other fish. They appear to be tiny bullets, swimming up in the water column. But when it is time for them to mature, they go through a transformation that is both cool and creepy. In fact, flatfish puberty makes the human teenage-years look like a piece of cake!

John D. Batten [PD]

When a flatfish begins to mature, the bones in its skull twist and move around. One eye starts to MIGRATE from one side of its head to the other side so that it has two eyes on the same side of its face. The fish starts to swim in a tilted manner. Additionally, the newly eye-less side of its body bleaches out, while the double-eyed side takes on a patterned coloration so that it blends with the ocean bottom. At the completion of this metamorphosis, the flatfish no longer swims in the water column but settles out to the floor. This way, the colored, two-eyed side faces up, and the blind, bland-colored side faces down. Its transformed head and body enable it to live this way, feeding as a bottom-dweller for the rest of its life.

So we can say that flatfish are extraordinary creatures.

But they help us understand more. Flatfish create a stumbling block for evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theorists try to explain how and why these assymetrical organisms came to be. They think that today’s flatfish evolved from bilateral (commonly shaped) fish. Yet they have a hard time explaining what drove those fish to evolve from a perfectly good torpedo shape to a re-formed sideways pancake, and they didn’t have any examples of fossilized transition organisms.

In recent years, scientists tried to explain flatfish evolution by comparing them to fish fossils found in a petrified coral reef in Italy.1 The fossils had asymmetrical skulls and one eye on the top of the fishes’ faces. They appeared to be pre-flatfish, somewhere between regular fish and modern flatfish.

But there is one problem.

These newly-discovered fossils are found in the same rock layers as the fish they should have evolved into! These “pre-flatfish”, then, are not really evolutionary transitions. If they were, then according to evolutionary theory they should have been found in rock layers lower than modern flatfish. So how can we explain the fossils in Italy?

Well, there is a great diversity among flatfish species, with some fish families exhibiting a right-migrating eye, others exhibiting a left-migrating eye, and still others with eyes migrating in either direction! These fish have internal genetic mechanisms that make them asymmetrical on the inside from birth, even though they appear symmetrical when they are young. Metamorphosis and “face transformation” is just a regular part of life for these guys. That means we should expect to find specimens that were fossilized during transition or even species with a different form of eye migration. That doesn’t prove they are transitions between symmetrical fish and asymmetrical fish.

What we can say is that flatfish are truly unique creatures that are part of the vastly diverse group of ocean organisms in the world.

1Friedman, M. 2008. The evolutionary origin of flatfish asymmetry. Nature. 454: 209-212