Nature And Science Speak About Allah. - Human Body

Nature And Science Speak About Allah. - Human Body
Let us turn to human biology to see how the different parts of the human body perform vital and highly complex functions in perfect co-ordination with one another.
The Brain is the central office which controls, directs and coordinates the varied activities of all the innumerable organs of the body. It receives messages from each of the senses, interprets them, sends the proper replies to the organs concerned so that the body reacts appropriately (jumps out of the way of an approaching car, for instance), and registers all the information received in the archives of the memory. Think of a huge telephone exchange in continual contact with every man, woman and child on earth, sending and receiving messages to and from each one every few seconds—and you have a faint idea of the incredibly complex organization of the brain.
In the white and grey matter of the brain, there are nearly a thousand million nerve cells, each of which is, by turns, an electric battery and a small telegraph transmitter. Each cell branches out into a number of fine conducting threads, the nerve fibres, which extend to all parts of the body. A large number of them run down the hollow backbone, twisted together into a thick cable, the spinal cord, admirably protected by the bony and wellcushioned walls of the spine. Through these tiny threads, each of which is covered with an insulating sheath, current flows at the speed of about 70 m.p.h, carrying messages to and from the brain, with marvellous speed and accuracy. There is an elaborate system of relays, condensers, switches, etc., which permits the transmission of the most unexpected messages between the brain and each of the millions of cells it controls, without the least confusion or delay.
The most complicated radio station, the most up-todate telephone exchange is like a tin of sardines compared to the incredibly elaborate maze of the nerve system of the brain.
The Ear: Long before man discovered wireless, the ear knew all that was to be known about the reception of sound waves. The human ear consists of a funnel, beautifully adapted to pick up sounds and equipped with fleshy folds, which enable it to perceive the direction from which the sounds come. Inside the ear, fine hairs and a sticky wax prevent harmful insects, dust, etc. from getting in. Across the inner end of the funnel there is a tightly stretched membrane, the eardrum, which vibrates like the skin of a tabla when sound waves strike it.
The vibrations are passed on and amplified by three bones (called the hammer, the stirrup and the anvil) whose relative sizes are precisely adjusted to produce just the needed amplification. Indeed these bones never grow: they are of exactly the same size in the infant and in the adult.
The amplified vibrations are carried by the bones to another membrane just beyond which lies the wonderful organ of hearing, the inner ear. This is a small tube (the cochlea) coiled up like the shell of a snail, and filled with a liquid, in which a harp of 6,000 strings ranging in length from 1/20th to ½ mm., hangs suspended. Each string vibrates to a particular frequency of sound so that the ear can hear all possible combinations of 6,000 different sounds. The vibrations of the strings are transmitted to 18,000 nerve cells whose fibres communicate with the brain.
The Eye is the world’s most efficient television station: it takes flawless pictures in colour and transmits them without the least blurring to the brain. It takes a photographer to appreciate fully the working of the eye. Like any camera, it is a small dark box, with an aperture in front-fitted with a transparent pane. In front of the pane there is a shutter of variable speed (the iris), with an adjustable slit and automatic release. Behind this, there is the crystalline lens whose curvature is continually adjusted by automatic muscles so that
whatever is looked at is always sharply in focus. Six large powerful muscles control the movements of the eye and point it in any desired direction. The delicate parts of this precision instrument are kept clean by the eyelids, which are window-wipers and use a cleaning fluid secreted by a gland at the corner of the eye and poured in through a siphon. A constant temperature is maintained, as in any laboratory with highly sensitive apparatus, by means of a heat regulating membrane, the choroid.
The photographic plate of the eye is a small screen at the back, the retina, on to which the images of the things we see are focussed. The retina can take 10 direct pictures each second or 800,000 pictures a day, wiping itself clean after each. It is so ‘fast’ that 30,000 separate points of light can be recorded by a single square millimetre (the size of a nail head) of its surface. All the pictures are in vivid colour, with sharp outlines, and delicate shading; they are, besides, movies and in 3-dimensions, thanks to the stereoscopic focus of the two eyes.
The Heart is a small organ, about the size of the fist, (4 inches long and 2 ½ inches broad), weighing not much more than eight ounces, yet this small pump can work prodigiously. It keeps on pumping day and night for a whole life-time without the least pause, rating some 100,000 strokes a day and sending about a gallon of blood circulating through the body, once every 13 seconds. In a single day, the heart pumps enough blood to fill a good-sized oil truck; in a single year it could fill a train of 65 large oil wagons.
The heart is specially built for the immense job it has to do. Its walls are made up of very tough muscular fibres, and it is surrounded by a double membrane (the pericardium) containing a fluid that lubricates its continual movement. The beat of the heart takes place in two steps, as first the upper and then the lower half contracts. This enables each half of the heart to rest while the other is beating. Inside, the heart is divided into 4 chambers, two upper chambers called the auricles and two lower chambers called the ventricles. Blood always flows from the auricles to the ventricles, and this one-way traffic is maintained by umbrella-shaped valves which guard the openings between the two sets of chambers.
Digestion: The digestive system can be looked upon as a factory where food is tasted by the tongue, then crushed by the teeth, moistened with saliva and finally, —after elaborate precautions to avoid shunting mistakes — is pushed through the gullet into the stomach, a chemical plant where the most astonishing changes occur. Here millions of cells, too small to be seen, produce a dozen highly complex chemicals which break up the food we have eaten, whether it be meat, spinach, rice, or cheese, into simpler substances, which can be absorbed by the cells of our body and built up into our flesh and bones. The chemical changes that take place are truly marvellous—well beyond the capacity of the best equipped of our laboratories.
And there are five million of these little chemical units in the stomach, some forty million in the intestines, and more than three and a half billion in the liver. They produce, not only the chemicals needed to digest our food, where and when required, but also effective remedies against diseases like cholera and dysentery. At the same time, the liver manufactures substances which help the body to burn some of the food we have eaten, to provide the heat and energy every living being needs. The digestive system is not only a chemical factory, but a powerhouse as well.
The Lungs: These are organs which bring the blood into contact with clean fresh air—for they knew, long before we ourselves were aware of the fact, that to purify the blood nothing is better than a good bath of oxygen.
At each breath, air is drawn into more than 1,500,000 little air-sacs in the lungs, which if spread out would cover an area of some 200 square yards—the size of a nice little vegetable plot. These little balloon-like sacs are made of a thin elastic tissue which allows air to pass through but prevents blood from oozing in.
The blood is carried to the lungs through 50,000,000,000 tiny hair-thin tubes which form a close network all along the outside of the little balloons of the lungs. Each day they bring in some 10,000 litres of blood. Oxygen is sucked in by the red blood cells, while waste products of the body like carbon dioxide and water are given up by the blood, pass into the little air sacs, and are breathed out.
As long as a child is in the womb of its mother its lungs do not function, and the flow of blood is turned away from the lungs by means of a special little door in the heart. As soon as it is born, the baby, who is on the verge of suffocation, utters a loud cry. The cry produces a whole series of wonderful changes. The great bags of the lungs open and air rushes in to fill them. A great flow of blood is drawn into the lungs which like a violent draught of air slams shut the little door inside the heart which had hitherto turned the blood away.
The Skin, with its vast network of sensitive fibres spread over the body’s surface is equally fascinating. The moment a hot object comes in contact with our skin, or even comes close to it, about thirty thousand “hot cells” feel it, and instantly report it to the brain. Similarly, there are 250,000 “cold cells” within our skin which crowd the brain with messages as soon as contact is made with a cold object. The body then begins to shiver and veins in the skin become dilated in order to make up for the loss of warmth in the body. When intense heat is “reported” to the brain, three million perspiratory glands are activated to release the cool fluid we recognise as perspiration. The nervous system is divided into different parts, one of them being the autonomic branch, which deals with reflex functions that are performed within our body, such as digestion, respiration, heart beat and so on. This autonomic branch is further subdivided into two systems: the sympathetic system, which causes activity and the parasympathetic system, which serves as a brake. If our body were under the exclusive control of the sympathetic system, the heart would beat so rapidly that death would result.
And if our body were left to the mercy of the parasympathetic system, the beating of our heart would be totally arrested. Both these systems function in perfect co-ordination with each other.
Whenever our body is exposed to excessive stress and strain, causing a sudden need for extra strength to withstand it, the sympathetic system dominates, making the lungs function more rapidly, and pumping adrenaline into the system from which the body may derive extra energy. But while we are asleep, the parasympathetic system has the upper hand, anaesthetizing all our bodily activities.
Throughout the universe, there are countless examples of such superb organization, far surpassing even the most advanced systems of man-made machines. The imitation of nature has lately begun to be treated as a regular object of scientific enquiry. Until very recently the scope of science was confined to the discovery of unknown forces in nature, and their practical applications. But now the study of various organic systems of nature is receiving special attention in scientific spheres.
This branch of science is called bionics. It seeks to understand how nature functions, transmitting nature’s patterns into mechanical form, in order to solve the myriad problems, which arise in the field of engineering.
Such imitations of natural systems in the field of technology is well illustrated by the camera, which is in fact, a mechanical reproduction of the function of the eye. The lens, the diaphragm and the photosensitive film correspond respectively to the outer layer of the eyeball, the iris and the retina. No one in his right mind would claim that a camera had come into existence accidentally, but there are a good number of intellectuals in this world who believe that an eye came into existence by the merest chance.
At the Moscow University, a device has been developed for the detection and measurement of infrasonic vibrations. It is five times more powerful than the conventional apparatus, being able to detect and report the approach of a storm twelve to fifteen hours in advance. What was it, which provided the pattern? Credit must go to the humble jellyfish whose organs are highly sensitive to infrasonic vibrations. Engineers simply imitated them. Similarly, the radar, a device of prime importance in defence technology, is a mechanical copy of the bat’s use of sonic waves to compensate for its blindness.
These are but a few of the many examples.