Chapter Five: Getting Ahead

I just love how Shubin titles his titles so cleverly. When I first started reading the beginning of this chapter, I was slightly disturbed by the way he says that he sawed through the head of the human, but it was still caught my attention. Later on, I was interested in the line, "To Goeth, this revealed the essential pattern within: the head is made up of vertebrae that fused and grew a vault to hold our brains and sense organs" (88-89). This shocked me because I never thought that the head was like a vertebrae at the back of spine. Then, Shubin explains how the embryo is segmented. Although the picture is weird, its amazing how the embryo shows the segments that will later become later the parts of the skull. In addition, the section of "Our Inner Shark" showed to me how closely we resemble sharks in our early stages. Even though the different segments do not completely become the same parts of the head, the resemblance is amazing. This shows how early creatures evolved to program the segments to become different parts of the head to their advantage. Shubin still amazes me.