Bioluminescence

I want to talk about bioluminescence, the ability of lightning bugs and foxfire and medusas to make their own unearthly light.

In the photos, medusas float lazily under their pulsing umbrellas, transparent, shimmering, glowing white against the dark watery sky. I wanted to comment on this ethereal beauty, speculate about why God created things---creatures, sunsets, paintings--we perceive as beautiful. Why God gave us this capacity to respond with pleasure and appreciation to certain arrangements of light and color and sound.

I suppose it’s adaptive, as the evolutionary biologists would say. It draws us toward things—mates, for example—that would not otherwise compel us. But why sunsets? Crater lakes? Jellyfish?

For me, beauty is a reflection of God: a piece of music so precisely exquisite it makes me want to cry, the quiet of a still wilderness lake. Somehow my senses sharpen and the world looks painfully, breathtakingly sharp, as if it’s designed for beauty. Our real eyes--our soul eyes—are attuned to this level of beauty. I hunger for it. It makes me believe again in a possible god, the possible good will of the universe.

Sometimes fact punctures fantasy. One scolding observer tells me that in the typical images of medusae in their white filmy garments, they’re not bioluminescing at all, merely reflecting the flash of the camera. In fact, Aqueforia misteriosa does not, on its own, luminesce. Only when the scientist pokes at it does it activate its green-light-producing organelles, and those few only at the very edges of its pulsing umbrella.

Still. I’m a sucker for beauty--as are most of the biologists I know. They too are prone to experience rapture in the natural world, to rhapsodize about intricacy and beauty in a way that points toward God, not away. To your face they will pooh-pooh the notion of “intelligent design””—they see natural selection as an impersonal mechanism. But deep down they’re enthralled by the intelligence of the natural order, its transcendent motive or organizing principle—they just call it evolution.