“Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoeba. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth" (Shubin 119).
This was one of my favorite passages as I was reading Your Inner Fish because it allowed me to visualize and put into perspective when certain evolutionary changes took place. It was also very easy to follow and kind of summed up what Shubin had stated early on in the book. I like that paleontologists make this type of analogy of the "earth year." Shubin uses this type of analogy to demonstrate how small of a fraction of the earth's history animals with hands, heads, sense organs, etc. have been around for. He kind of puts everything that he has talked about so far into perspective by describing it in the "earth year" format. He states that most of life's history is the story of single-celled creatures and that basically everything else comes after and is only a small portion of the big picture. I really enjoyed and understood what he was trying to portray with this correlation.
This was one of my favorite passages as I was reading Your Inner Fish because it allowed me to visualize and put into perspective when certain evolutionary changes took place. It was also very easy to follow and kind of summed up what Shubin had stated early on in the book. I like that paleontologists make this type of analogy of the "earth year." Shubin uses this type of analogy to demonstrate how small of a fraction of the earth's history animals with hands, heads, sense organs, etc. have been around for. He kind of puts everything that he has talked about so far into perspective by describing it in the "earth year" format. He states that most of life's history is the story of single-celled creatures and that basically everything else comes after and is only a small portion of the big picture. I really enjoyed and understood what he was trying to portray with this correlation.
I really liked this quote! It does help you put everything into perspective and it's crazy that we didn't appear until the very last day of the year. In general I think it is easy for us to think that we humans have been around for such a long time but in reality compared to when the earth originated, we are very late, and still tend to think sometimes that the world revolves around us.
ReplyDeleteRuby,
ReplyDeleteThis was one of my favorite passages too! I think it is so interesting how he put this into perspective the way he did. It reminded me a lot of Introduction to Biology when Dr. Murphy did a similar example with unrolled toilet paper around the class room. I am not sure if you had him as your professor as well but the example showed a similar effect and helped me visualize the time scale of life more clearly just like this quote did! It really amazes me how it took all the way until December 31st until humans were present.
It's also a lot like the video Dr. Johnson showed us the very first day of class!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback guys! Emily and Leah, I too was pretty intrigued by the fact that we originated at the last day of the year. This just goes to show that there is so much more to the story. And Aparna, I also made that connection when I was reading this passage! I think it is a great way to put evolution into perspective.
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