Neil Shubin Quotations

When we got back into the lab, we removed the rock from the bone, and we began to find some really significant stuff.

We were always looking over our shoulders; we saw lots of tracks.

Here is a creature with fins that can do push-ups. This is clearly an animal that is able to support itself on the ground.

Here is a creature with fins that can do push-ups.

It could flex the elbow and extend the wrist so the tip of the fin could lie against the ground. It could do a push-up.

It could either push itself straight up and down or pull itself forward. It more likely flopped around like a seal rather than walked like a horse.

It is a fish that shows a surprising combination of characteristics of land-living animals.

Outside, it's a classic Arctic scene. But inside those rocks is a tropical world.

Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish. The shoulder, elbow, and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals.

Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish.

What we saw was a real mosaic between characteristics of fish and those previously thought to be only in land animals. The fossil was showing us how creatures were assembled over time to live on land.

When we look inside the fin, we see a shoulder, we see an elbow, and we see an early version of a wrist, which is very similar to that of all animals that also walk on land.

We've really only begun to sort of crack that spot.

We did a few high fives when we uncovered the fossil, but there's only so much celebrating you can do in the Arctic.

Another thing to get used to in the Arctic is being in the food chain. There are polar bears there, and polar bears eat people. So we carry weapons.

That's ideal having the snout sticking out because in the cliff behind it is likely the rest of the animal.

This is not some archaic branch of evolution. This is our branch of evolution. This is our wrist. This is the evolution of our neck.

This animal represents the transition from water to land?the part of history that includes ourselves.

It represents the transition from water to land - the part of history that includes ourselves. When we talk about the fish's wrist, we're talking about the origin of parts of our own wrist.

It shows us the stages by which land-living animals were constructed.

It took a long time for us to figure out really the extent of what we had.

The world is filled with puzzles, all kinds of interesting questions and it's our challenge to figure them out. It's not just like this static file cabinet of things that human beings know. It's ever expanding.

We were staring at the origin of a piece of our own bodies inside this 375-million-year-old fish. We had a fish with a wrist.

With respect to the ZPA, what kind of digit develops depends on how close the digit is to the source of Sonic hedgehog.

When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others. By dividing endlessly, or by failing to die properly, these cells can destroy the necessary balance that makes a living individual person. Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another. Like bullies who break cooperative societies, cancers behave in their own best interest until they kill their larger community, the human body.

We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.

We would never have scales, feathers, or breasts if we didn't have teeth in the first place.

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 amoebae. 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.

Each galaxy, star, or person is the temporary owner of particles that have passed through the births and deaths of entities across vast reaches of time and space. The particles that make us have traveled billions of years across the universe; long after we and our planet are gone, they will be a part of other worlds.