#86 The Tongue

One of the most amazing and powerful muscles in the human body is the tongue. Without it we would hardly be able to speak and communicate, let alone something like singing.

Besides that, our tongue greatly facilitates our ability to eat because it moves the food around in our mouths while chewing. Try eating without using your tongue sometime.

It also just so happens that our tongue contains all of our taste buds which send signals to our brain letting us know if our food is sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami (now being intensely studied). Imagine your life without your taste buds every day at every meal and every snack in between.

Evolutionists do not have an explanation for the origin of the tongue. They also have a hard time explaining how a somewhat similar organ accidentally developed in many, many totally unrelated species on the so-called “tree of life”. Reptiles have long tongues for snatching their next meal out of the air. Snakes have a forked tongue that also allows them to smell. Butterflies have a proboscis that unfurls and gets inserted into flowers to suck up nectar. The Blue Whale has the biggest tongue, weighing in at almost 6,000 pounds. [1] It certainly looks like there was some intelligent planning going on.

The human tongue is composed of eight different muscles. How wonderful that they decided to work together in harmony. If you refer back to my Proof for God #61 Muscles [2], you will read that scientists have no explanation for where muscles could have originated. Muscles are that unique.

Four of the eight muscles are attached to bones. They are called “extrinsic” [3]. These muscles allow you to move your tongue out and then back in, and side to side and back again to the middle. It certainly is a wonderful accident (for atheists) that we developed a muscle that pulls the tongue back in after we stick it out. Otherwise we’d be stuck with our tongue out all day. I’m sure the muscle that pulls the tongue in must have evolved second. If the tongue never sticks out, there would be no benefit for developing a muscle to pull it back in.

The other four muscles in the tongue are called “intrinsic”. “These muscles alter the shape of the tongue by: lengthening and shortening it, curling and uncurling its apex and edges, and flattening and rounding its surface. This provides shape, and helps facilitate speech, swallowing, and eating.” [4]

The astounding property of these muscles is that there are no other muscles like them in the human body. Scientists don’t know where they came from and don’t know much about how they work either. The only similar muscles like them are found in the legs of an octopus.

"The human tongue is a very different muscular system than the rest of the human body," Khalil Iskarous, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California who is helping to lead the research, said in a prepared statement. "Our bodies are vertebrate mechanisms that operate by muscle working on bone to move. The tongue is in a different muscular family, much like an invertebrate. It's entirely muscle — it's muscle moving muscle." Both move by compressing fluid in one section of a muscle, creating movement in another part. But we know little about exactly how that movement is initiated and so finely controlled.” [5]

If you look at the underside of someone’s tongue, you will see lots of blood vessels. These are needed to constantly supply the muscles of the tongue because it is always working. Even when you are sleeping your tongue is working. You wouldn’t have a tongue without those blood vessels, so how do evolutionists explain the accidental mutations that had to evolve both the muscles and blood vessels simultaneously.

“When we swallow, we stop breathing, and a stiff little flap attached to the back of our tongue covers the top of the trachea, so that food slides down and into our stomachs and not into our lungs. That flap is called the epiglottis.” [6] Can evolutionists explain the process of slow and gradual development of the epiglottis? If you don’t have the whole thing in place from the beginning, you would constantly be choking on your food.

You have of course heard of fingerprints. Well, you also have a “tongue-print” that is totally unique to you among all human beings. [7]

“Your mouth is the home of 600 different types of bacteria and a single saliva drop contains 1 million of those bacteria.” [8]

I imagine that atheists must feel very grateful for the extremely long series of fortuitous accidents that allows them to be able to talk. In an astounding coincidence to the evolution of a tongue, we also evolved the larynx right at the top of the tube going to our lungs where air could be exhaled over it to make various sounds. The mouth also evolved into a very convenient shape that allows the three working together to make a tremendous variation of sounds. Those sounds get accidentally heard by the ears of other humans, who luckily evolved ears. 

All those variations of sounds could be repeated and repeated until the other person began to figure out that they actually meant something intelligent. Atheists refuse to see any intelligent planning behind all this. They insist that for every small incremental and accidental mutation at the DNA level there must have been some benefit to the new DNA so that it was “selected” by a natural (i.e. godless) law. It won out over all other DNA patterns until the next slight change. Either the larynx, tongue, and mouth developed simultaneously or they developed sequentially, but in the end we could talk and others could listen.    

As you can probably tell, I’m having trouble taking the theory of evolution seriously.

What is the explanation for how taste buds evolved? They are so small you can’t even see them.

“Each taste bud is made up of taste cells, which have sensitive, microscopic hairs called microvilli. Those tiny hairs send messages to the brain, which interprets the signals and identifies the taste for you.” [9]

The average tongue has between 2,000 and 10,000 taste buds. Each taste bud has about 15 receptacles that send the signals about taste to your brain. Every 10 to 14 days, your taste buds die off and are replaced with new ones. [10] Thank God or cosmic accidents for that DNA mutation!

It’s really wonderful that taste buds accidentally would evolve on your tongue rather than your toe, or your fingertip, or your elbow. In fact, they are mostly found on the top side of your tongue with a few others underneath your tongue, on your lips, or in your cheeks. [11] There are five different kinds of taste buds. Now how did that evolve? And miraculously they all happen to be on or around your tongue. How great is that?

None of your taste buds work unless they are in a moist environment. That’s a nice coincidence too because your mouth is a moist environment. In fact, the tongue is covered with a mucous membrane and even has saliva glands to keep the tongue moist. By doing just a little research on the chemical process that happens between the chemicals in our food and their stimulation of our taste buds, we find that the whole process inside the receptors is incredibly complex. I think evolutionists have a problem explaining this too.

If you put something sweet in your mouth, the taste receptor for sweet gets triggered and sends an electrical signal all the way to a specific location in your brain. Luckily there is a really, really long chain of nerves that accidentally connects your taste receptor to your brain. It’s really lucky or we would never know what sweet is.

I’m guessing that sweet taste buds would have had to be the first to evolve because they are our favorite. Then after tens of thousands of years there was an accidental mutation and another and another and finally we had a new taste, maybe “salty” or “sour”. I’m pretty sure “bitter” would come last. Then it happened again, and again, and again until there are finally five different tastes. Wow. Is that believable?

How wonderful and amazingly lucky that we have all those taste buds or else eating would be mighty, mighty dull. Also it’s a fantastic coincidence (for atheists) that it just so happens that the food that evolved  out there in the world just happens to trigger the taste buds that evolved and we end up with delicious tastes. Not only delicious but nutritious too. If the food out there tasted terrible and wasn’t healthy for us, we would never eat it and hence never have energy to keep on living and evolve. Then we wouldn’t be here.

This is just too many lucky accidents for me to believe in.

There must be God.

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[1] Fun Tongue Facts for Kids, http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/humanbody/tongue.html

[2] Jim Stephens, Proof for God #61 Muscles, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2014/05/61-muscles.html

[3] Wikipedia, Tongue, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue

[4] Wikipedia, Tongue, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue

[5] Katherine Harmon Courage, Octopus Arms, Human Tongues Intertwine for Science, Scientific American, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/octopus-chronicles/octopus-arms-human-tongues-intertwine-for-science/

[6] Health Topics for Kids, Introducing Your Tongue, http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/HealthTopicDetailsKids.aspx?p=335&np=152&id=1832

[7] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/

[8] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/

[9] Steven Dowshen, Your Tongue, http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/tongue.html

[10] Sarah Klein, 8 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Your Tongue, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/11/tongue-facts-health-info_n_5952850.html

[11] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/