A Computer with Fins

Job 21:22
“Shall [any] teach God knowledge? seeing he judgeth those that are high.”

The glass knifefish, popular in home aquariums, has been the subject of study by two University of California researchers. They have concluded that this unusual looking fish has such a complex nervous system that it is basically a computer with fins.

As the 6- to 7-inch native of South America swims along, it generates up to 700 weak electrical impulses a second, which it uses like radar to navigate. The returning signals are received by specialized cells all over the fish’s body.

The fish’s brain then processes these signals in much the same way that our brain processes the signals from our ears and tells us the direction of the source of sound. However, where we use sound waves to tell us direction, the glass knifefish uses electrical impulses that travel much faster than sound. But not only are those impulses faster but there are up to 700 signals per second to process. The fish’s secret to processing this huge amount of information is called parallel processing. This is a technique that has been discovered and applied to produce the fastest computers yet.

The glass knifefish is an unlikely design to have evolved. The highly sophisticated information-processing technology built into this fish can only be attributed to the Creator, presented to us in the Bible.

Prayer:
Dear Father in heaven, man’s greatest knowledge and wisdom and his most advanced discoveries are so small in comparison with what You have made that they serve to give us a greater appreciation of what You have done in creation. Remove human pride from me and teach me complete dependence on Your Son, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Notes:
Photo: Courtesy of Haplochromis. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.