Chapter SEVEN: Adventures in Bodybuilding

Even though there were only two pictures throughout this whole chapter, I still enjoyed it because Shubin helped paint pictures in my head as I was reading. When he says "A proteoglycan, then, is a molecule that actually swells up with water, filling up until it's like a giant piece of Jell-O. Take this piece of gelatin, wrap collagen ropes in and around it..." (126-127), I imagined a giant piece of green Jell-O with ropes in and around it! This helped me visualize and understand why cartilage is a good pad for our joints. I also found that Shubin's analogy of the bridge and the skeleton was really good. A bridge does depend on its materials, size, shapes, and proportions; and there is a whole engineering process required to make a major bridge. If some parts go wrong in the planning process, then the bridge may collapse. From this comparison, I learned that our skeleton is like a bridge because it grows and changes to prevent us from "collapsing". Other than that, I learned a lot from this chapter such as the way cells can communicate to form a body and that single celled animals may have formed bodies as a way of avoiding being eaten.

- Nirav Patel

p.s. I made it big so it is easier to read