It's a transition, he said, that all humans still carry within their own limbs. In his plenary address at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting, the University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist described what we know about the transition from finned fish to the first sprawl-legged land walkers.

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting | Atlantic Photography BostonĪll humans have an 'inner fish' lurking in their wrists and necks and eyes, one that Neil Shubin and his colleagues have discovered through fossils from the Arctic and from genes turning off and on in developing embryos. If an experiment can produce a simple body-like organization from a no-body in several years, imagine what could happen in billions of years.” In short, a simple version of a multicellular form had arisen from a no-body. The most surprising thing happened when the predator was removed: the algae continued to reproduce and form individuals with eight cells. Eight turned out to be the optimum because it made clumps large enough to avoid being eaten but small enough so that each cell could pick up light to survive. In less than two hundred generations, the alga responded by becoming a clump of hundreds of cells over time, the number of cells dropped until there were only eight in each clump. Then they introduced a predator: a single-celled creature with a flagellum that engulfs other microbes to ingest them. “They took an alga that is normally single-celled and let it live in the lab for over a thousand generations. Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body The same is true when we infer relationship among species.” It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries- no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy- are related to me to different degrees. “No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered 'The Ancestor.' Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small.

Your inner fish shubin