The piece below was taken from the Biblical Tongues Yahoo
Discussion Group.
Hello
all,
One of my personal and constant goals is to aim to be creative in thinking,
especially in regards to problem solving.
With that goal in mind I am
always on the lookout for books, articles, whatever, on the subject of
creativity.
Today I came upon a "doozy" an excellent, excellent example of
creativity. I was checking out the website of Steven Lewis and
specifically a short two page article he wrote on creativity.
In it, he
shares a wonderful example of creativity, of finding what had never
been seen. In this case, scientists as recent as 1995 found two
previously unrecognized skeletal muscles. This is amazing when you think
about how many autopsies, dissections of corpses have occurred.
They actually found something new by doing something different!
Sound familiar?
Here is Lewis' description (with my emphasis added):
'...Now
back to creativity. Textbooks usually present the muscular system as if
all the skeletal muscles have been discovered. This viewpoint hardly
seemed unreasonable until a team of researchers at the University of Maryland discovered
in 1995 two previously unrecognized skeletal muscles
that connect the orbit of the eye to the mandible (lower jaw bone). These
were not
tiny muscles either.
Neither were they vestigial (useless), like the auricularis muscles (helps your
dog turn its ears). These new muscles, labeled sphenomandibularis,
actually help us masticate. Chew to you.
Their discovery
shocked the anatomy community. Who
would have thought after hundreds of years of human dissection and learned
discourses
that another pair of muscles lurked inside of bodies! How
could they have been missed all this time? One
explanation has to do with the ways dissections are usually
done.
Dissections of the head usually are done using transverse incisions (cutting on
a horizontal plane). The Maryland researchers decided
to take a different approach.
They dissected in a vertical plane, cutting off the tip of the nose and
proceeding posterior. This new approach yielding
the startling discovery that had for centuries been overlooked.
Trying a new approach sometimes can pay off big...'
Wow! I see so many parallels with this and our discovery of
the proper understanding of languages in the New Testament. And in the
area of anatomy, everything (at least they thought) is open and visible for all
to see. It's all out there, and yet for centuries they missed it, because
they were *cutting* a certain way (cf., like the traditional view of languages
which always *cut*/assumed that a language miracle had occurred!; and so they
never *cut* in a way that would have yielded the diglossia explanation!)
I just had to share this with all of you.
The next time someone says: "well how come nobody ever saw this
before?" THINK OF THIS STORY!
Bob Zerhusen
