Tuesday, May 27, 2014

#61 Muscles

If you are a fan of any sport, I’m sure you are amazed by what human beings can do. How strong and how fast they are and how coordinated they can move is astounding. It is almost incomprehensible that their eyes can see a ball moving over 100 miles an hour and through the brain coordinate their arms, legs, and hands to catch or hit that ball with precision. Also, I’m sure you know that many animals are capable of feats that humans cannot begin to duplicate.


All of these movements are accomplished by specialized cells called muscles.

If you do an Internet search for “evolution of muscles”, you will come up with almost nothing. The articles have totally speculative statements or are just a description of a supposed sequence of development, but there is no explanation. If they are honest, they will admit they have no idea of the origins of muscles. For example, “The structure and function of vertebrate striated muscle, which can be contracted at will, has been studied in detail, but its evolutionary history remains obscure.” [1] Here is another, “While the structure and function of muscles, especially of vertebrates, have been intensively studied, the evolutionary origin of smooth and striated muscles has so far been enigmatic.” [2] Even Wikipedia, which is pro-evolution, admits this with a disclaimer at the top. “This article has multiple issues.” [3]


The tiniest movements we make, like the “jitter” of each eye over 30 times a second [4], like every beat of your heart, like large jumps with your legs, are all accomplished by muscle(s). Every time your mind wants your body to do something, it calls on specific muscles to accomplish it.

Not only movements, but our minds have so many emotions they need to be able to express. So our faces are designed with all the muscles we need for that. Why would all those facial expressions we can make be necessary in order to be the fittest to survive as evolutionists claim?


I like this description from How Stuff Works. “Because muscles are so crucial to any animal, they are incredibly sophisticated. They are efficient at turning fuel into motion, they are long-lasting, they are self-healing and they are able to grow stronger with practice. They do everything from allowing you to walk to keeping your blood flowing!” [5]

Many things inside your body happen automatically to keep you alive, but they happen without you having to think about it. Muscles move your food down your esophagus, through your stomach and intestines, and all the way out. Your lungs suck in air. Your heart beats almost every second. This is all done by muscles.


Wikipedia has a list of 642 “skeletal muscles” which are the ones controlled by our consciousness and the list includes their location in the body and their purpose. [6] But some other sources may count muscles differently and come up with as many as 850.

Muscles exist in 320 pairs. According to Wikipedia’s sources, “almost every muscle constitutes one part of a pair of identical bilateral muscles, found on both sides,...” [7] Remember this point. It will be important later.


There are 3 distinct types of muscles.

            Skeletal muscles, also called “voluntary”, are ones which can be controlled by the mind. These are the 642 mentioned above.

            Smooth muscles, or “involuntary”, are ones which we cannot control. They are contained in our digestive system (esophagus, stomach, intestines), blood vessels, bladder, bronchi (lungs), arrector pili (skin), and, in females, the uterus (childbirth).

            Cardiac muscle is found only in the heart and is very unique. The cells are specially designed and connected so they can all contract at the same time at the command of cells called “pacemaker” cells in the heart.


42% of a man’s body mass is muscle. For women it is 36%. While we are on the subject, it could be noted that men and women have many differences in their muscle systems, particularly in the reproductive area. If you want some fascinating reading sometime, check out how the uterus works.

The Skeletal muscles can be further subdivided into “slow twitch” or “fast twitch” muscles. The slow twitch muscles contract for a long time but with little force. The fast twitch muscles can contract rapidly and with strong force. The fast twitch muscles are even subdivided into 3 more categories.

Muscles are made up of many, many muscle cells which are arranged together in bundles inside a sheath called a sarcolemma. Furthermore, many of these sheaths are again bound together in a large bundle which is surrounded by another sheath called a fascicle. Then again many fascicles are bound together in another sheath called an epimysium. This reminds me of the steel cables used to make the Golden Gate Bridge. This design gives amazing strength.


Inside every muscle there are numerous arteries and veins to bring blood with oxygen and nutrition and carry away waste products. There are also many nerve endings coming all the way from the brain that initiate contractions. There are also many mitochondria in the cells to process oxygen, fats, and carbohydrates as fuel for energy.

The whole process of chemical reactions and how a muscle is able to contract and relax is super complicated and over my head. But you can research the details yourself if you are interested.


Common sense will tell you that our muscles were designed by a super intelligence. The abilities of man-made robots are miniscule in comparison.

Remember I noted that muscles all come in pairs. If you put your arm out, you need a complementary muscle to pull it back. If you look up, you need a complementary muscle to pull your eye back down. If you step forward, you need a complementary muscle to keep you from falling over.

If there is no God, and all muscles came about by accident, mutation, and natural selection, how can you account for complementary pairs of muscles? Mutation would have to guess right 340 times. Suppose you evolve a muscle (which isn’t easy) that will move your arm out. What good is that? How many generations will it take with all people having their arms hanging out until some individual evolves a muscle to bring his arm back in. If it’s a man, he has to wait for a woman to also evolve that same muscle to pull in her arm, find her, marry her, and have children. Then they become the Adam and Eve for all mankind because we all have both those muscles. All the people without both those muscles have died out. Oops, I almost forgot that we have to repeat that process 339 more times to account for all the pairs in our bodies. And that’s just the voluntary muscles. How we could possibly evolve the cardiac and involuntary muscles is still not accounted for.

Remember evolving a muscle is not going to be simple. You have got to also evolve the nerves (connected to the brain) and arteries and veins (connected to the heart) inside the muscle and then surround it all with 3 layers of sheathing. You also have to evolve the tendons to connect the muscles to your bones. This is not even in the realm of possibility.


Natural Selection would theoretically prevent the evolution of muscle pairs anyway. Survival of the fittest would eliminate single muscles before their complementary muscle could evolve. You can’t close your eyes and not be able to open them. If you stick out your arm and can’t bring it back, you would not be one of the fittest that could survive.

I’ve already discussed in other posted articles the explanations of how mutation [8] and natural selection [9] have never been shown to be processes that can produce new species. So to, they are not processes that can even begin to explain how muscles originated either.

We discussed human muscles above, but every other species of mammal, fish, birds, and insects has muscles as well. Most all of those muscles are in pairs. We’re talking about several million species that would have had to evolve their own unique muscles to accommodate their unique skeletons.


All those species also have hearts and involuntary muscles as well. Those would all have to evolve separately too inside every animal species. This is astronomically impossible.


Think about involuntary muscles for a minute. If evolution were true, then at some point before our lungs worked automatically we would have to think “breath in, breath out,” all the time. Ridiculous. Before our esophagus evolved to automatically push our food down, we would have to think about it. At what point after many generations of evolution did we have to stop telling our stomach to move the food along and our lungs start breathing on their own? Equally ridiculous. It was all in place from the beginning or we would have died out as a species.

What about the cardiac muscle in the heart? How did that muscle accidentally “evolve” and start beating. At what point did the arteries and veins get connected and then blood was created to move around the body or up to the lungs for oxygen and back again?

The masterpiece of the human body is not the result of ad hoc, random additions over many generations.

It was designed from the beginning.

There must be God.

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[1] Evolution of muscles, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, http://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2012/2012_woerheide.html

[2] Searching for the origin of muscles, Science Daily,   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120628145626.htm

[3] Muscular evolution in humans, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscular_evolution_in_humans



[6] List of muscles of the human body, Wikipedia,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_muscles_of_the_human_body

[7] List of muscles of the human body, Wikipedia,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_muscles_of_the_human_body

[8] Proof for God #27, The Truth About Mutation, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/27-truth-about-mutation.html

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