Chapter 7: Adventures in Bodybuilding

By far, this was the most interesting and complicating chapter. It was hard to follow Shubin as he moved rapidly from explaining when bodies came on the planet to learning about the Collagen and molecules. Even though he moved very fast, and sometimes I had to re-read a page or two, it was actually interesting and not bland like other chapters. Personally, I loved how he broke it down into three parts: When? How? Why? Because he broke it down into three simple, yet complicated questions, it was easier to understand his argument and follow him. One of the most interesting thing about this chapter was when he said, "Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present" (119). It was really interesting when he said that "the first human appears on December 31" (120). It completed shocked me and I re-read that paragraph about 6 times to understand what he was saying and if he was actually saying what I thought he was saying. Other than that, every thing else was not easy to understand, but it took a long time to understand what Shubin was trying to say. Overall, this was a pretty interesting chapter and hopefully the next few are just the same!