Chapter 6: The Best-laid (body) plans

Well to start off i did not really like this chapter. From the start Shubin begins with a general but confusing comment "It is more difficult to find out basic design in really primitive animals ... Don't even bother trying to compare your body plan with a sponge." True, he not being descriptive and or using challenging diction, he just, in my opinion, places a strange statement when he's opening the discussion for the embryonic stages. Well if i think of it, Shubin, overall, was not that confusing because he states that an adult stage of two different species is epically different and in order to see the similarities between two species one must venture and observe each species embryos. I think its insane that at one time we had something in common with a gelatinous blob. Even though i didn't really like this chapter I still learned a plethora of information. For example: i learned that in our early days of life, after conception, the human being appears to be a tube with in a tube., due to cell reproduction, division, and destruction. I also learned that a species embryo contains specific genes and codes and when in planted into other eggs a twin or deformed specie is created. So if you "cut, slice, and dice, and you'll find that all mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish have organizers." Out of all the things i learned from this chapter i thought it was amazing how our DNA strands could even link us to animals even simpler than flies. True, we have some sort of connection to every animal in this world but who would have thought that humans and insects could be distinctively related. This chapter did have a lot of information, even logical information like so species have an axis of symmetry and others don't. I think that the question the chapter end in great because it leaves the reader thinking about evolution and the production of man. So to answer this question i say, I believe you could compare the human bodies to single celled microbes through i guess, the DNA strands.