Your Largest Organ: Skin
Not your brain, not your lungs, not your bones—your skin. Most of our pleasure, our greatest protection, a vitamin factory, our ability to survive heat and cold, and such beauty as we are permitted, indeed is truly “skin deep.”
by Jack Hoehn | 15 May 2024 |
There is no you without your skin. This marvelous organ is no trial and error patched together Rube Goldberg device, but in every way miraculously engineered for purposeful bipedal life. It lubricates itself, cleans itself, and repairs itself. It constantly replaces old worn out cells with brand new ones at a rate of a million flakes an hour. House dust is mostly you.
Skin is not one single thing. It is not one type of protein. Hair comes from skin, but you do not have one kind of hair—you have at least seven different types. You do not have one kind of sweat. You do not have one thickness of skin: your eyelids are not the thickness of the soles of your feet.
And then you have finger and toenails: keratin like the outer skin, yes, but fully designed for function.
Your hairs are also keratin, but fully designed for function. Where shall we start? Seventh-day Adventists have seven different kinds of hair. (Of course, so do first-day Christians.) You don’t have to shave your eyebrows every morning, like a man’s beard. Your eyelash hairs are quite different hairs than your eyebrows. The hair in your armpits is different from the hair on your arms. And chest hairs, belly hairs, and pubic hairs are unique, purposeful, functional.
How would you ever evolve those seven different hairs, skin? Did hominids who had to trim their long eyebrows every morning in order to see get ambushed by leopards and lions when they forgot to invent small scissors?
(Oh Jack, this is cheap sarcasm! Let the skin quote back to you Shakespeare in defense: “Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?” I stand chastised.)
The skin is too amazing, too wonderful, and clearly has adapted or evolved to meet the different needs of all haired mammals. Features do, of course, adapt and evolve, because they were designed to so do. But what tempts me to sarcasm is the obvious intention, purpose, function of each little hair in its complexity and adaptation—to make fun of the idea that everything came from nothing, for no purpose of all, except survival of the fit.
Air Conditioning
I don’t mean to make you nervous, but I notice you are beginning to get moist sweaty palms. Do you know that you only sweat on your palms when you are anxious or nervous? No, I don’t know why—perhaps to help you slip out of a trap or a tight spot you have slid into?
But your other sweat glands are constantly working. If you are in a cool place doing nothing, you may sweat, respire, and urinate 1 ½ quarts a day. If you are actively working in a warm or hot place you may sweat 1½ quarts an hour! Without your skin keeping your body temperature below 104 degrees, your brain does not work. Fever often brings on convulsions in children. Your skin sweat glands make you a walking air conditioner. Hikers in hot conditions who do not replenish the lost quarts of water soon become confused and wander off the trail to their destruction.
Your skin is coordinated, cooperating, communicating and complex. Emotions are communicated by eyebrows and wrinkles. Huggers don’t get the message by words alone: they need their Paccini’s corpuscles, Ruffini’s corpuscles, Meissner’s corpuscles (different kinds of touch receptors). They know you like them with a handshake, pat on the back, or hug.
And life’s most intense pleasures come from the generously sensitive lips and genitals. Oh happy excitement and pleasure from touch! Even the Bible says to greet one another with a holy kiss.
Shady Lives
Melanin is the world’s best sunscreen. It darkens in summer and lightens in the winter. Only pigments make the visible difference between the races of the world. Wherever I have lived, white people want to tan and get browner; black people want to lighten and get lighter brown; so I suspect the perfect human skin melanin concentration would be some shade of beautiful brown?
Genetic Eve was certainly not a white woman. Genetic Adam, like our Jesus, was likely some shade of brown. The rest of us have to make do with the skin tones our ancestors gave us. That means shady lives for the white skins, sunnier lives for darker people.
Sun exposure for production of vitamin D in the skin is necessary, but sunburns, freckles and frankly tanning from sun exposure are always carcinogenic. Even with melanin pigmentation, men with thin or no hair should always wear hats when outdoors. Sunscreens work, but clothing is a better and protection than any lotion, spray, or cream. The best sunscreen is the one you will use and frequently reapply.
Aging of the skin is caused by sun exposure and damage—which is why it is easier to estimate the age of white people than the age of people with pigmented skin. Black skin is not only beautiful, it is also healthier and ages slower.
The skin is not sterile. Most of the germs that live on the skin are harmless, but it is also true that infectious diseases are more often passed by our hands than by any other source. One of the hardest things in the history of medical science was to convince physicians and surgeons to wash their hands. It is still hard to convince people to keep their hands clean, although I think we have mostly convinced surgeons to do a thorough scrub and wear gloves before operating.
Cosmetics
What we put on our skin is of minimal of consequence. Cosmetics with vitamins, hormones, herbal extracts, magic ingredients from “high in the Himalayas” are mostly treating anxiety. They have proven benefit only to the sellers. Lotions, creams, shampoos, conditioners, makeup—all are a personal decision. If you like it and it feels and smells nice to you, use it.
As for men’s hair: Bill Bryson says in his book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, “the only known cure for baldness is castration.”
Overall, you really don’t need waste much money on magic in bottles beyond a reasonably priced sunscreen.
Historically, religion has spent a lot of energy condemning tattoos, lip stick, eye paint, women’s clothing, and men’s hair length. Isn’t it time to hear a word from the Lord? 1 Samuel 16:7,
“The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”
This is #9 in series on worship guided by science. #1 is here. Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD, CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London). His book Adventist Tomorrow—Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus in its second edition continues to be the most popular book Adventist Today has published. Jack’s wife, Deanne, has published a delightful new book called Loving You—I Went to Africa, about their 13 years as medical missionaries. These books are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page. All sales go to support Adventist Today.
The pictures of the children of different skin tones are friends at Mwami Adventist Hospital in Zambia.
