Home > Author > Neil Shubin
1 " In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer. "
― Neil Shubin , Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
2 " We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history. "
3 " But why live in these environments at all? What possessed fish to get out of the water or live in the margins? Think of this: virtually every fish swimming in these 375-million-year-old streams was a predator of some kind. Some were up to sixteen feet long, almost twice the size of the largest Tiktaalik. The most common fish species we find alongside Tiktaalik is seven feet long and has a head as wide as a basketball. The teeth are barbs the size of railroad spikes. Would you want to swim in these ancient streams? "
4 " Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth. "
5 " When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others. By dividing endlessly, or by failing to die properly, these cells can destroy the necessary balance that makes a living individual person. Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another. Like bullies who break cooperative societies, cancers behave in their own best interest until they kill their larger community, the human body. "
6 " Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made. "
― Neil Shubin
7 " In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless. - Dwight D. Eisenhower "
8 " Our body dries out with every passing year; newborns are about 75 percent water, not much different from an average potato. "
― Neil Shubin , The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
9 " By the mid-1980s, [Stephen Jay Gould] had emerged as a major public figure, using his background as a paleontologist to dive into controversies with radical stances on the ways new species emerge and how evolutionary change comes about. His [popular history of life] college class was composed of around six hundred students who, taking it as a distributional requirement, were unlikely to become science majors. This audience proved an ideal focal group for Gould to try out his new theories and presentations. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the fall he held forth, lecturing with dramatic flourish to undergraduates who either sat rapt in the front rows or sprawled sleeping in the rear ones. "
― Neil Shubin , Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
10 " Ever twisting, turning, and at war with itself and external invaders, DNA provides the fuel for evolution’s changes. Ten percent of our genome is made up of ancient viruses, and at least another 60 percent consists of repeated elements made by jumping genes gone wild. Only 2 percent is made up of our own genes. With cells and genetic material of different species merging and genes continually duplicating and repurposing, life’s history flows more like a braided and meandering river than a straight channel. "
11 " North America and Europe are getting farther apart by 1.5 centimeters per year. Australia is heading for Hawaii at about 7 centimeters per year. The plates on our planet move about as fast as hair grows on our scalps. "
12 " Like a sixty-year-old person on actuarial charts, the habitable Earth is three-quarters of the way through its calculated life expectancy. Earth is about 4.57 billion years old, and the laws of stellar physics tell of another billion years before the sun expands to the point that it bakes the possibility for life off the planet. "
13 " Each galaxy, star, or person is the temporary owner of particles that have passed through the births and deaths of entities across vast reaches of time and space. The particles that make us have traveled billions of years across the universe; long after we and our planet are gone, they will be a part of other worlds. "
14 " [T]he unknown should not be a source of suspicion, fear, or retreat to superstition, but motivation to continue asking questions and seeking answers. "
15 " Over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. "
16 " We would never have scales, feathers, or breasts if we didn't have teeth in the first place. "
17 " No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries-- no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy-- are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species. "
18 " The immediate thing that strikes you when you see the inside of the hand is its compactness. The ball of your thumb, the thenar eminence, contains four different muscles. Twiddle your thumb and tilt your hand: ten different muscles and at least six different bones work in unison. Inside the wrist are at least eight small bones bones that move against one another. Bend your wrist, and you are using a number of muscles that begin in your forearm, extending into tendons as they travel down your arm to end at your hand. Even the simplest motion involves a complex interplay among many parts packed in a small space. "
19 " كل صخرة على وجه الأرض لها قصة،قصة ما كان عليه العالم في حين كانت تلك الصخرة تتشكل،وداخل الصخرة هناك دليل على المناخات،والعوامل المحيطة الغابرة،التي عادة ما تكون مختلفة إلى حد كبير عما هي اليوم.أحيانا يكون الانفصال بين الحاضر والماضي أكثر حدة. "
20 " What is it about a hand that seems quintessentially human? The answer must, at some level, be that the hand is a visible connection between us; it is a signature for who we are and what we can attain. Our ability to grasp, to build, and to make our thoughts real lies inside this complex of bones, nerves, and vessels. "
