Chapter 8: Making Scents

This chapter was really simple and surprisingly short. How Shubin described extracting DNA from bodies, he made it sound so interesting and in his words: "incredibly easy". I found it cool how "our sense of smell helps us discriminate among five thousand to ten thousand odors" (141). How some odors connect impulses in our brains to past memories really shows what our mind stores up for us. The description of the "lock-and-key mechanism" amazes me because it reacts simultaneously. Shubin later goes on explaining how three hundred of the thousand genes are rendered completely functionless by mutations. Even though we devout three percent of of our genome to odor we do not use much of it. Yoav Gilad found out that mammals who have color vision have large numbers of knocked-out smell genes. I immediately thought to myself "That's why dogs are color blind and their sense of smell is extraordinary". I guess God likes balancing out His creations :).

~Caroline Eskander