This was the final chapter in this informative, yet entertaining book. I enjoyed how Shubin managed to tie it all together at the end and leave you feeling satisfied with the knowledge he presented, yet also making you want to learn more. The biological "law of everything" is what I found myself focusing on most during this chapter. Everything he mentioned I would tie to this fundamental law. This law basically means that every living thing on the planet had parents. This law even found a way to connect to the biological mechanism of heredity to allow us to apply it even to creatures like bacteria. The extension of this law is that all of us are modified descendants of our parents, or our parental genetic information. The central issue of this law is deciphering the family tree of species, or their pattern of relatedness. This issue was described like a peeling onion with tracing relatedness through subsets: revealing layer after layer of history. It was cool how Shubin compared us and our inner fish to a hot-rod Beetle (throwing in a history lesson with Hitler and Porsche). This comparison allowed me to understand why we are bound to have problems...I could also understand the issues we face by referencing back to this comparison. The issue of hiccups grasped my attention the most though because of its complexity and how the nerve spasm was a product of our fish history, while the hic is an outcome of history shared with animals such as tadpoles. I found it shocking how diseases such as cardioencephalonyopathy can kill infants that have it. This disease is a genetic change that interrupts normal metabolic funcition of mitochondria. Discoveries of our inner flies, worms, yeast and fish help us find causes of diseases we suffer from and allow us to find ways we can develop tools to live longer and healthier. So while our ancestry can handicap us in some ways, knowledge of our ancestry can help us overcome them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment