Ch 7: Adventures in Bodybuilding

This chapter was really interesting. Shubin makes the text easier to understand by creating analogies. It not only adds to the fun of reading the chapter but it actually makes me understand what Shubin is trying to say. It was interesting to find out that our bodies originated from organisms that didn't even have a body. Shubin gives reasonable arguments as to why bodies didn't appear much earlier before. Such as, he states that when the earth first came about, there was barely any oxygen to give growth to bodies. With bigger bodies you require more energy and more oxygen. I like how Shubin always makes a connection between all organisms such as us having the same basic molecules or different versions of the same molecules. He made it evident that if communication between cells in a body didn't happen, it could prove to be dangerous and that the cells wouldn't know when to divide, die, or makes molecules. References to movies, such as the Blob, really helped me visualize what he was trying to display.