If you listen hard while lying in some kind of repose, you will hear your heart beating. After a fierce dinner or perhaps after being denied dinner, you can hear your stomach rumbling. Sometimes these are the only external markers that there is a whole system at work in there. We will quickly discount peeing, farting and other such excretions. You get so used to them that they hardly draw your attention as much as hearing your pulse racing. And what a marvelous system is at work under your skin! Amazing, complex; in many ways as complex as the universe. After all Biology has fewer answers today (as to why and how things are) than Physics. And given that the IQ of Homo sapiens is roughly the same across the two fields, I assume it’s because of the sheer scale of complexity of the biological systems or the complexity of interactions within it. No one can hear themselves think! The machinations of your most amazing organ (le brain) are largely unnoticed and even unknown. A bit mind boggling this is.
That’s why I think we would be a different species by now if we simply had translucent skin. I.E. you could basically see what’s happening under the covers at any given time – heart beating, small intestines digesting, blood flowing hither and tither, brain thrumming. If the complexity of it all was uncovered, we’d be much better people – lower obesity (imagine seeing your heart falter and your tummy swell each time you eat), more curiosity about how it all works (“hey mum, see what that chili does to your lungs!”), etc. Heck even our medicine would change because a lot of procedures are designed to get around the opaqueness of the skin to what’s underneath. Would gunshot victims be fewer? Wouldn’t it be harder to take a pot shot at a defenseless organ even if you were angry vs. at a whole opaque skin covered person (heck you don’t know what you’re aiming at unless you passed high school biology!)?
Imagine yourself with translucent skin, able to see how your body worked all the time. And see how those around you worked as well. Would you be different?
Granular glass frog (Cochranella granulosa), photo by Kristen Martyn
