In His Image
I'm no scientist. I didn't have high school biology - just a quick course in college. But I have faith. And I know scientists can be foolish like anyone else, sometimes. **
This past September, The New York Times published an almost silly article about a study that's misleading. The headline says, "Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability."
That took me by surprise, because I'd read enough to know that sea jellies, as they're called now, are soulless bundles of nerves. Sea jellies can't be made to chase any prey, can't know the worth of giving birth, have no idea what it means to be blessed with food. Instead, sea jellies lead a life of releasing venomous stingers at bullet-fast speeds any and every time their tentacles touch anything that does not have their exact same chemical blueprint.
That means adult jellies of different subspecies sting and kill one another on contact. That also means many of the embryos that jellies release into the open ocean, are stung and absorbed by the parent the same way the parent stings and absorbs anything else that isn't exactly chemically the same as itself.
The one exception is any "mate" that happens to float into the adult tentacles.
The tentacles *see* the chemistry of the opposite gender of the same subspecies; then, the tentacles involuntarily contract, bringing the opposite gender into the creature's dome - the same way the tentacles contract into the dome when touching an embryo that has broken loose, a crab, a calcified piece of seaweed, or whatever. It's only an involuntary response to chemicals (including calcium carbonate), that make the difference between a "mate" not being stung but a foreign organism being killed, partly absorbed, and quickly dropped to the ocean floor in a more primitive process than our cells have in disposing of a virus.
And, where the release of eggs and seed are involved, there isn't any chemistry at all. Jellies are pretty much always releasing eggs and seed into the open sea, meaning some jellies are reproduced without any contact at all between male and female jellies: something that happens when seed and eggs happen to collide in the open sea and embryos develop a little like tadpoles.
It's a haphazard existence.
And jellies do not see. As plants have photosynthesis, jellies have something like eyes that only sense shadows and light, even moonlight. Cloudy skies can cause jellies to just sit, like plants in a dark room. But given light and shadows, their "eyes" draw them toward large objects, such as tree roots and reefs, kind of like when actual fish that have brains, are drawn to shadowy places to hide. A jelly, however, is like something stranded between being a plant and a fish - but it is not a fish. A jelly can't be made to process any information about its environment. It can't see anything and respond. What it can possibly do, is recoil as we recoil if touched by something burning hot.
That may well be what happened when scientists put black and white stripes in a cloudy pool with Box jellies for an experiment. The Box jellies' nerves are chemically bound to cause the jellies' thin tissues to expand and contract and push that ball of nerves toward spaces where light and large shadows are. The Box jellies in the experiment involuntarily pulsed over to the black and white lines, but after running into the wall where the lines were posted, the jellies stopped pulsing over to the wall - nerves probably shocked into stillness. Whatever the case, the Times had no business repeating the faulty claim that jellies may learn. That idea isn't grounded in good science. Jellies are not like a human being in a coma but able to hear and remember after awaking. Jellies truly are brainless, not able to store feelings, destined to expand and contract, expand and contract.
But I'm not saying all this for the sake of science. I'm saying this to share a word of faith.
By faith, I see jellies as having a bleak existence. I have no idea what Heaven intended with jellies. They are not food for us, and they barely feed - and don't really fertilize - anything in the seas.
It's wrong to say anything of God's will for our lives is like anything about the way the sea jellies exist.
God only knows: Maybe Heaven cast some ungodly-behaving creation into the "life" of a jelly, perhaps as eternal punishment, long before God-with-us.
As I say this, I'm reminded of another time I had an oddball thought like this. It was when I saw a photo of people feeding manatees (aka, sea cows).
The manatees in the photograph I saw, were extremely bloated with weight, apparently because they didn't have to swim much to find food. What also struck me about these manatees is that the angle of the photo caused one of the animals to resemble a pig. And I thought, probably very wrongly, oh, Lord, are these happy animals a remnant of the swine you cast into the water?
Today, I decided to do due diligence, to try to learn a little more about manatees. The overriding question I ended with in my search is whether there could be any evolutionary tie between manatees and the wild boar.
The only thing I can say for sure, at the end of this day, is that science, so far, has only shown a tie between elephants and manatees. And science has only wanted to stop at knowing hogs are related to other hogs. *
* Not an endorsement of any particular diet
** This post has been hacked into, more than once, by someone who sounds arrogant, not faithful. But God is faithful to make a way for us to clean up when inconsiderate people are messing up.
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