October 10 2012, 11:46 PM
How can we learn more about ourselves through of ancient fossils?
The overall point of chapter one of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish is to explain to the reader the connection between ancient fossils and today, whether they be from the species or not. He wants us to know that once upon a time we were all one, and from that one species thousands of years ago, different species and different types of animals have evolved and developed, going extinct and thriving, and finally getting to where we are today. He introduces what he will be talking about in this book by explaining that we can find our evolutionary history through fossils of ancient fish. This helped explain the evolutionary history of the human body to me because when I had first started reading this book, I didn't know that we were this closely related to fish. In this chapter, the concept that was most interesting to me was his basis for the story about Tiktaalik. I thought it was so interesting how these paleontologists had found the earliest fish that were most related to what we would think of as fish today, and then the fossils of the more developed ones, the ones that would have a bone structure closest to ours. They had such a hard time, though, trying to find the fossil of a new fish that was in intermediate between the two different kinds of animal. The idea of this itself is fascinating, that fish slowly evolved into man, and that if you are determined and look hard enough you can find physical evidence of this slow but steady transformation.
The theme from this chapter is about how we all are from the same basic family and all grew from that one [fish]. Because of this theme, this chapter helped me make the connection most closely to Big Idea #1. This idea states that the process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. This is almost perfectly resembles this chapter because it is talking about evolution and how that is what causes all diversity in the world, yet we are all still united.
The overall point of chapter one of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish is to explain to the reader the connection between ancient fossils and today, whether they be from the species or not. He wants us to know that once upon a time we were all one, and from that one species thousands of years ago, different species and different types of animals have evolved and developed, going extinct and thriving, and finally getting to where we are today. He introduces what he will be talking about in this book by explaining that we can find our evolutionary history through fossils of ancient fish. This helped explain the evolutionary history of the human body to me because when I had first started reading this book, I didn't know that we were this closely related to fish. In this chapter, the concept that was most interesting to me was his basis for the story about Tiktaalik. I thought it was so interesting how these paleontologists had found the earliest fish that were most related to what we would think of as fish today, and then the fossils of the more developed ones, the ones that would have a bone structure closest to ours. They had such a hard time, though, trying to find the fossil of a new fish that was in intermediate between the two different kinds of animal. The idea of this itself is fascinating, that fish slowly evolved into man, and that if you are determined and look hard enough you can find physical evidence of this slow but steady transformation.
The theme from this chapter is about how we all are from the same basic family and all grew from that one [fish]. Because of this theme, this chapter helped me make the connection most closely to Big Idea #1. This idea states that the process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. This is almost perfectly resembles this chapter because it is talking about evolution and how that is what causes all diversity in the world, yet we are all still united.
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