Everyone knows what warts are. They are ugly little excrescences that appear on our skin. They seem to, and actually do, have a life of their own. They are made from our bodies, but don’t belong to our bodies. They even develop their own blood supply, tapping into the body’s arterial system for a source of oxygen and nutrients.
But what causes warts? Not everyone knows, and down through the years a lot of wild guesses have been made. One very popular – but false – notion was that touching a toad brought on warts. (That must have seemed very logical, given the predilection of boys both to pick up toads and to develop warts on their hands; but in reality there is no connection between the two events.)
Modern medical science has discovered that warts are caused by viruses. They are, in essence, a disease, and are transmitted like any other disease caused by viruses or bacteria. That is, they are passed on by a carrier. So it isn’t touching a toad that causes a wart, but touching another wart, or a hand which has touched one, or a doorknob that hand has touched, and so on.
Warts are basically harmless and tend to disappear of their own accord, given sufficient time. However, warts which chance to develop on the sole of the foot – called planter warts – can become quite painful and require treatment to remove them, simply because of their location.
But the intriguing aspect of warts is that they are caused by viruses. Here is something visible, caused by something invisible – for viruses are so small they can only be seen under the extreme magnification of an electron microscope. How does the virus cause this relatively huge growth to develop? Even more intriguing, how does it cause the wart to grow its own parasitic blood system? And what does the virus employ as building material for its project?
We know the answer to the last question: the virus uses the cells of the host body which it finds at hand. Somehow it forces the human body – our bodies – to abdicate control over those cells. Our bodies continue to supply everything needed for the life of those cells, but they are now under the control of an invading alien – the virus.
If you have heard about plant galls, in which certain insects and microbes are able to redirect the development of plant tissues, you will note an immediate parallel. The gall wasps force hickory trees to build cozy structures to house the next generation of wasps. The wasp larvae dictate this development through a complex chemical they secrete which overrides the plant’s own chemical blueprint.
Very much the same situation seems to be present in the development of warts – with the difference that humans are the victims and viruses are the aggressors. It may well be that ultimately researchers will discover that something similar happens when cancers develop in the human body.
Be that as the future will determine, it is amazing that something so tiny can enforce its will upon parts of our bodies, and make us build it a home of its own design. The question of intelligence cannot properly be asked about a virus: its structure is so simple that scientists cannot even be sure whether it is alive! And yet, beyond any reasonable doubt, vast intelligence created the mechanism that viruses use to redirect our cellular growth.
Once again, when we peer beneath the surface of the commonplace, we discover the signature of God! The evidence of His handiwork is everywhere, from the greatest stars in the heavens to the smallest particles in the atom.
“Yahweh’s [that is God’s] works are great, pondered by all those who delight in them… He has caused his wonderful works to be remembered… He has shown his people the power of his works…” (Psalm 111:2, 4, 6)
(All Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible translation.)