Shubin starts the chapter by talking about how an animal is built and goes into the when, how and why questions about our bodies. He talks about cells, which make up our bodies. Our bodies need to communicate with each other, be able to make new things. He tells us that a batch of cells that doesn’t work with each other is a cancerous tumor. “Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another” (118). They are bullies that kill their larger community which is our body.
When Shubin starts talking about how long humans have been on earth, even though I already knew that we haven’t been here for long I was still amazed. “…with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present…The first human appears on December 31” (119-120). Reading that made me feel so small and just showed how long we have come from the first humans, which to me is a LONG time, but in reality it’s like a couple hours in the history of the earth.
I liked learning about the collagen, cartilage proteoglycan. At first I was confused, but with Shubin’s comparison of a proteoglycan as a giant piece of Jell-O, and he says “Take this piece of gelatin, wrap collagen ropes in and around it, and you end up with a substance that is both pliant and somewhat resistant to tension. This, essentially, is cartilage. A perfect pad for our joints” (126-127). And as Ashima said when Shubin related collagen to a tug-a-war I would be able to remember it more.
I always wondered how we could know how long ago something happened, such as for how long were oxygen were low. We know by the chemistry of rocks, by the telltale signature.
Thanks to oxygen levels increasing bodies appeared.
ALSO, thanks to cells we have bones and thanks to bones we have a skeleton and without a skeleton we’d be goo.
- Nikita Patel
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