This weekend I wasn’t feeling so well. I think maybe I got sick from a co-worker. Regardless, I tried to get a lot done. I transplanted some plants, started some seeds indoors, worked with Syd and Trent to build a salad box, and even managed to play a little Zelda and Resident Evil 4. In with all that, I also read a book, Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body“
If anybody still doubts that we share common ancestry with the rest of the life on this planet, if anybody still thinks that we’re so unique and different from the rest of the animal kingdom, they have only to read this book and they will discover that to be human means to be the product of a long, weird, chain of events that brought fish to land, and warped their bodies until they were us, and that this chain of events still affects us every day.
I just could not put this book down. I absolutely tore through it. By the time he was explaining the connections between tadpoles and hiccups (it’s near the end) my mind had been blown so many times that I felt giddy.
Thanks Mr. Shubin for making such incredible information so accessible, for drawing the picture so clearly and for bringing a bit more wonder into the world. Wow. Just, wow. And they say that religious awe is impressive? That’s nothing compared to this…
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