Chapters 8,9,10,11 Final Blog!

Chapter 8(Making Scents): Chapter 8 wasn't as good as I expected compared to the other chapters, but the way that Shubin talked about how our scent and sight are connected I found that to be quite interesting. Also I found it odd that 3% of our genome is strictly for smell but we don't use it. I also loved that the chapter was very straight to the point and didn't have a lot of useless information, but it seemed as though it was fine because he still found a way to incorporate fish into this chapter as well.

Chapter 9(Vision): Chapter 9 was all about learning about vision. I found the diagram on page 151extremely interesting because it shows us how first we see a shape, then we see the color, then we see what it is, and then we see all of the details that make up the items that we see everyday. Learning about the eyeless gene or the aniridia in humans was actually really frightening when I began to visualize it especially after i Googled it and saw what the actual eyes looked like. It opened my eyes (no pun intended) into realizing that some people don't get to experience what we do because of these rare conditions.

Chapter 10(Ears): Chapter 10 was actually very informative becasue all i knew about the ears before I read this was that ears helped with balance and hearing. I didn't know that alcohol remained in the ears causing people to be off balance nor did i know that it was the ear that was responsible for helping with acceleration for both a human and an animal. After reading chapter 10 i feel as though i owe a lot to my ears.

Chapter 11(The Meaning of it All): In all honestly I was pretty excited to be finishing the book. I loved how he last chapter just explained the way that everything that he had previously talked about tied together in creating such an amazing thing. It was the perfect ending to this novel that made me learn beyond what I would have learned over summer break about the various body parts and different animals that had the same qualities as we did. Last I found that this book was a wonderful way to enter into a year that will be full of much more information about EVERYTHING we just read and learned about. Thank you Neil Shubin for all of the interesting, and not so interesting facts and stories that you have fill my brain with for the past 2 months.:)

-Neha Modha