Ch. 6

How fascinating is that all vertabrate embryos started out the same way but twist and turn into different parts in the future. This reminded me of that picture on ch 5 where the human embyro looked like the shark embryo with the same gill arches. Moving on to the development of the embryo, I was disgusted when I learned that sometimes the baby can grow from the buttocks of the woman. I wish to see this in real life, but my conscience tells me no. The most remarkable discovery that Shubin commented on was Mangold and Spemann's discovery of the Organizer. I would like to see these experiments performed on humans just once to see if humans can grow two heads. Two heads are most certainly better than one. Imagine how fast humanity can progress if everybody had two heads. But why don't humans have two heads? oh well. At first I can see no similarity between the body plans of humans and sea anemones, but Shubin's analysis of the genetics of the sea anemones made me realize that we do have a similiar belly-to-back axis. Now I'm convinced that we are all similar to other living animals somehow.