Spiritual Lessons from Biology

People find God in the mountains.  Abraham ascended a mountain so he could hear the voice of God.  Moses ascended to see His face, and he came back down with his own face glowing like fire.  As for me, i climb to lose myself in the quietness, to hear the symphony of a trillion pine needles softly strumming the wind. In the seasons when i am stateside, my aunt and i climb a different mountain every week.  She teaches me the names of wildflowers, and i tell her about my adventures.   Not long ago we summited Mount Audubon.  On the way up, as with any peak above 11,000 feet, we came to a great scree field.  It’s a desolate place above the tundra where only lichen grows.  There is no soil, only scorched rocks and slabs of granite.  It’s a place of howling winds and baking sun.  Yet something extraordinary had taken root there.  My aunt called me over to take a peek.  There, among the sterile landscape, grew the most exquisite col...

"Cease listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge." (Proverbs 19v21) The largest mammal in the world is the Blue Whale.  But the longest living is the Right Whale.  Eubalaena glacialis is unlike other mammals because of the way it grows.  There are two main types of skeletal structures in the animal kingdom: fused and unfused.  Reptiles have unfused bones, meaning they can grow as big as they need to and, thus, live longer.  Mammals have fused bones and tend to have a set longevity.  Yet the Right Whale, unlike any other mammal, has unfused bones.  Thus they live for nearly 300 years.  And they have a very, very good memory. Unlike other whales, the Northern Right Whale displays no curiosity around human beings.  They will not approach a ship, or call to each other when humans are present.  They vanish just as soon as they are spotted.  And biologists can guess why. “Right Whales” are s...

During my undergraduate years i was learning how to fast.  As i progressed, i decided to try fasting and praying for three full days.   i was still attending classes and working during this time.    By the third day my stomach had stopped grumbling and the hunger pains had subsided.  My last class of the day was a mammalogy lab.  We were learning to stuff animals for taxonomic collections.  Our specimen that day was a mouse. While i was preparing the specimen, something very strange happened.  i cut into the skin of the dead animal, tearing gently to expose the flesh inside.  My eyes widened and my stomach leapt.  All at once i came to the sickening realization that i was hungering for a mouse carcass.  After three days without a scrap of food, my body trembled at the thought of consuming the scrap of meat on the dissecting table in front of me. i composed myself, left the classroom, drank a ton of water, and returned to finish ...

On 5 August 2015, 3 million tons of toxic waste was spilt into the Animas river.  Iron, Lead, Zinc and Copper, deadly heavy metals, filled the water rapidly.  Fish choked in the Arsenic, Beryllium and Cadmium.  A terrible stench filled the air around the river, and just looking at the color of the water was enough to make your stomach turn.  By the end of the first day, the polluted water had reached New Mexico. Who was the culprit?  An atrocity so potent as this was surely the doing of some villain.  Ironically, The Environmental Protection Agency was to blame. The Gold King Mine is a suspended mine; it hasn’t been used for centuries.  Yet the EPA thought they would do some investigating to make sure the mine was ‘secure’.  Yes, indeed, the  mine was secure until the team began digging around to see just how secure it was.  That’s when all hell broke loose and the sleeping monster was unleashed.   It’s not totally clea...