“The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals,” Neil Shubin writes in his new book. “The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are often simpler versions of ours.”
In Your Inner Fish, Shubin…uses new fossil finds, genetic discoveries and animal anatomy to trace the origins of humans and the evolution of different body parts, such as limbs, teeth, head, ears and eyes. He explains how everything that is apparently unique about humans is built from parts that are shared with other creatures.
“I was hooked from the first chapter,” writes paleoanthropologist Don Johanson, co-discoverer of Lucy. “Creationists will want this book banned because it presents irrefutable evidence for a transitional creature that set the stage for the journey from sea to land. This engaging book combines the excitement of discovery with the rigors of great scholarship to provide a convincing case of evolution from fish to man…”
Shubin tells this story not only to the scientist, but also to the lay reader. His message is the same: “I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity,” he writes, “and remedies for many of the ills we suffer, nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that have ever lived on our planet.”
Shubin’s writing delightfully and accurately talks to the whole range of potential readers.
I wish this had been available for Giftmas. Publication is next week, 15th January.
#24 – oladimeji
You haven’t thought this through.
“but it is certain we will exhaust or transmute all earth’s resources before 1,000 years at the most.”
But you see there are two problems with that statement.
1. Earth’s ‘resources’ will continue to exist, for the most part, just not necessarily in the forms we found them.
…and, far more importantly,
2. “Resource” is just a word. Nothing in nature is a ‘resource’ except in the sense that it has utility for some living thing. Petroleum is a ‘resource’ only to humans. Apes, cats, dingos, snakes – none of them have the slightest use for it. It is, literally, just a bunch of organic waste. You could say that by not disposing of their own carcasses properly, saurians polluted the planet with the stuff. But one species’ waste is another’s fuel, just as the CO2 that we exhale is a ‘pollutant’ to us, but is to photosynthesizing plants what oxygen is to us; not only not a pollutant, but a necessity.
If we, e.g., consume much of the free oxygen in the atmosphere and return mass quantities of CO2, we have ‘polluted’, but only relative to the biota that, like us, consumes the former and outputs the latter.
In the objective reality, we have polluted nothing. We have changed the atmospheric balance of O2 and CO2, which is good for some things and bad for others. For us, it’s bad. But the planet does not care. All the cycles continue to function and those functions will change over time due to natural influences. And our actions are among those natural influences. The ecosphere does not share our concern with our survival, because it doesn’t have concerns. Only sentient beings do.
That isn’t to say that, say, replacing the O2 with CO2 is good for creatures with oxygen-fixing metabolisms, but nature will adjust. What we don’t want, and should take pains to avoid, is to excite natural adjustment mechanisms that will adjust us out of existence.
Whether something is a ‘resource’ or a ‘pollutant’ is strictly relative, and in fact, relative to each species. GW will not be good, in most ways, for humanity. But an increase in the percentage of the planetary surface that the hydrosphere accounts for would be beneficial to countless aquatic species. But not us, and that has to be our primary concern.
It doesn’t matter to spaceship Earth if we spew tons of various chemicals into the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere. It will compensate. But it matters to us, and the fate of other creatures should matter to us as well, the higher up the evolutionary tree, the more they should matter.
We would not benefit from an atmosphere with a significant percentage of ammonia, so WE would consider ammonia a pollutant. But what about Jupiter? Is ammonia a pollutant there?
I am saying, you need to look at the larger picture; place yourself as an alien visitor to Earth, who is objectively observing the cycles of life on the planet. Avoid personal, emotional reactions. You will come sooner to more objectively accurate judgments. Nature does not participate in our anthropocentric value judgments, since values are only a human conceptual abstraction.
And don’t anthropomorphize nature. She hates that. 😛
Don’t forget Alaska’s own Ray Troll–the talented illustrator. Of “Spawn ’til you Die” fame. And “Humpies from Hell”. http://www.trollart.com
@#32.
i did think it through. a man i knew once defined pollution as a resource out of place – just as you have done. however, when i said ‘we’, i referred to man. without hydrocarbons, without nuclear fuel, he will simply have to die to restore the balance. A house built of concrete/wood/bricks (including our gadgets) are transmuted material that cannot be re-‘mined’ (think plastics, aluminium – all those materials that are part of waste fills now). In the end, even nuclear energy materials will run out. Of course, there will be new technology. But they will depend on some of energy, won’t they? Man will not die off as resources become limiting; it will have to be wars. But we are talking thousands of years to come.
Ah, but I have faith that within a few decades, maybe sooner (since my predictions of this sort tend to be both accurate and conservative 😉 ), we will reach sustained fusion at better than break-even. And once that’s done – as long as steps are taken ahead of time to prevent commercial monopolization of the tech – we’ll no longer need worry much about pollution or energy. Anything bad, plastic bottles, radioactive waste, whatever, toss it into the plasma and reduce it to it’s component atoms.
That’s why I think it shortsighted (and a little too late anyway) to worry about petroleum exhaustion and such instead of putting all the effort we can into the development of fusion, which is the inevitable future of energy production.
“Scientists can make an educated guess but they can never have proof that you are the offspring of a retarded fish having butt sex with monkey.”
No argument here. My guess is that either the monkey would drown or the fish would suffocate, rendering the whole hypothesis moot.
Wow! That’s really wonderful! Shubin’s writing delightfully and accurately talks to the whole range of potential readers.
#38
speaking of retarded….what in the hell are you talking about racism for. Race has never entered into this conversation. Unless of course you consider your retardation a race. Thanks for playing.
BTW, you still showed no proof for your mythical science god