This chapter, being particularly short, finally interested me when Shubin began talking about how we actually smell things and how it works as a lock and key mechanism, just like it said on The Magic School Bus:D. What surprised me was that "a particular odor might involve lots of different kind of molecules" because I had always believed that there were just certain types of odor molecules that just flooded into our nose going to our brain. But Shubin as always with his analogies helped facilitate this concept stating that smell is like a chord in music, "our brain perceives these different impulses as one smell".
Also fascinating is how even the smelling function could be used to prove the "water to land transition" as there were two types of smelling genes: one for "picking up chemical scents", while the other "specialized for air".
Also when Shubin said that a whole bunch of our odor genes were knocked out for sight, this statement made me wonder such as what happens to blind people from birth, are their odor genes still knocked out. As "primates gained color vision while losing large number of olfactory genes" is this why dogs have such good senses of smell? HAHAH.
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