YIF: Chapter 8 Review

March 3 2013, 9:34 PM  by Rinu Daniel

How can our senses of smell lead to understanding our evolutionary history better?
Chapter 8 of Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin begins the discussions of the senses. This chapter is about the sense of smell. The sense of smell, as many don't know, can provide great knowledge about the history of mankind. Our genome has 3% of its genes dedicated to the sense of smell. This is connected to evolution because we cannot detect many scents anymore because many of the genes for those have stopped working due to mutations. This didn't only happen in humans though, it's happened in similar animals too, due to the same mutations. This shows a clear connection.

            The most interesting part of this chapter was that something as small as the sense of smell can constitute a part of the large story of life. I would've never have thought that something like the sense of smell could tell you about evolution. This chapter most closely related to Big Idea #1 because it  talks about the evolution of animals. An example is of how the human sense of smell has lost a few scents, but so have other similar animals, showing we might've come from the same ancestor.