Chapter 6: The Best-Laid (Body) Plans

I thought it was interesting that every species from something as small as a fish to something big as a elephant could all look generally similar as embryos. It was hard for me to imagine that even very different limbs like wings or legs could have ever resembled each other even though it had been as embryos
When it came to the part where Spemann experimented with newt eggs and his daughter's hair. Despite the fact Shubin mentioned that baby hair is remarkable, I thought that the newts would become, for sure, deformed because Spemann had not used "scientific" tools. I also thought it would become deformed because it was divided into two parts "forcefully" not naturally. However, my guess was wrong and I was shocked when two salamanders emerged normally as if nothing had happened.
The passage about Mangold made me furtherly dumbfounded because she took a part of an embryo of a different species and grafted into a species yet the grafted embryos still continued to develop. However, it turned out to be that the Organizer than helped make this possible. As this book progresses, I become lucid in the fact that size especially in the body is not an indication of importance because the organizer is also a seemingly insignificant tiny piece of a tissue but is the main way the embryo forms.
In the previous chapter, it was said that worms without a head are the origins of "the essence of our head" This fact had been surprising but it was even more astonishing that in some ways "primitive versions of some of our major body plan genes" were from sea anemones. The fact that animals that had a jellylike body could be the predecessors of humans that actually had bones was beyond my imagination