YIF: Chapter 7 Review

What was our true ancestor?

            Chapter 7 of Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin talks about the process of single celled organisms to multi-cellular organisms like us humans. As the chapters go along they are progressively getting more and more complicated and complex. Science shows that we all had one common ancestor that, way back in ancient history, was a single celled organism. Most of Earth's history was made up of single-celled organisms. Over time though, through evolutionary processes, bodies started to form, multi-cellular bodies. Today, if a cell is taken out of our bodies (depending on which cells) our life could quite possibly be at stake. In multi-cellular processes, the cells do not act alone anymore but instead rely on each other to survive. In single celled organisms, this was not the case.

            The most interesting part of this chapter was that multi-cellular bodies first appeared, at least in fossil records, a little more than 500 million years ago. This was especially interesting to me because  that, in the scope of Earth's history, is not very long at all and to think that it only took 500 million years to have a single-celled organism to become what we are now is amazing and hard to wrap my mind around. This chapter, like many of the other chapters in this book, relates most closely to Big Idea #1 because it has to do with evolutionary aspects and talks about the growth and process of a single celled organism becoming a multi-celled organism over time.