Every Part is a Head
The Bible and the Headlines: News You Can Use
In Washington Irving’s “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow” a headless horseman is purported to haunt a small New England town. For centuries, science had its own headless “horseman.” The question that haunted zoologists was, “Where is the ‘head’ of a starfish?” The news this week is that the starfish is headless no more.
On November 1 Popular Science featured “The Sea Star’s Whole Body Is a Head.” The article reveals that the starfish (aka ‘sea star’) is even creepier than Washington Irving could have imagined. Instead of a “headless” creature, the starfish is a walking ‘head.” A scientist notes, “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor.” The same is true for the starfish’s other relatives like the sea urchin and the sand dollar.
The Smithsonian picked up this story on November 6 in its article, “A Starfish ‘Body’ Is Just One Giant Head, Study Finds.” The article lists other missing elements of starfish anatomy, “They have no blood and no brains.” Scientists had previously assumed that starfish did not have a “head.” A recent study notes, “The opposite is true—that sea stars are all head and no tail.” Scientists made this discovery by studying star fish DNA. The next challenge is to see if the “tailless” pattern is also present in sea urchins and sand dollars.
The global news publication Insider featured, “Scientists Finally Solved the Centuries-Long Mystery Of Where A Starfish’s Head Is” in its November 6th edition. This article focused on the DNA analysis of starfish. The author of the recent study on starfish stated that scientists, “…were expecting to find some genes that resembled a head and some that resembled a trunk — similar to most animals. But, instead, they found mostly head-like genes.” In layman terms, this means that the “head” is located throughout the starfish’s five limbs.
In the early days of Christianity, the church in the city of Corinth wanted to be a “starfish.” By this I mean, these Christians were claiming their “head” (leader) was superior to other Christian’s head (1 Cor 1:12). God reminded the Corinthians that being only one part of a body was not a good thing, “Suppose the whole body were an eye—then how would you hear? Or if your whole body were just one big ear, how could you smell anything?” (1 Cor 12:17). The Corinthians were told, “What a strange thing a body would be if it had only one part! So God has made many parts, but still there is only one body” (1Co 12:19-20). The “body” that God was talking about was not only the Corinthian church, but the world-wide Church.
There is one way that the Church is supposed to be like a starfish. Just like the starfish is only a “head” in every part of its body, we, too, are our head (Christ) in every part of the Church: “All of you together are the one body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:27). This makes the whole world our Sleepy Hollow.
