Some Assembly Required by Neil Shubin
I used to teach some of the things mentioned in this book to my 6th-grade students. I was an art teacher. I thought art was about ideas, and those ideas could come from any field of knowledge. If I had my students make artwork with the subjects of fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, and insects, then I felt I could talk about these animals’ lifecycles and mention evolution as a normal part of biology.
Administrators and school leaders should have been happy that I brought topics in science into the art curriculum, but they had little imagination and education. They had objections and harassed me. They also had problems with astronomy and with multicultural lessons that looked at the artwork of different world religions. They thought the world was organized according to the dictates of some deity who, like themselves, apparently did not himself have a scientific worldview or interest in different cultures and religions.
Once, I had the names of geologic time periods on the chalkboard with dates written stating time in millions of years. I had the names and drawings of organisms whose fossils were discovered in particular layers of the earth that corresponded to the first approximate appearance of particular life forms. A coach came in one day, saw the chalkboard, and left me a badly written note arguing against the possibility of a time scale of millions of years because he believed in a recent creation and a time scale of earth’s history in thousands of years. He also used the word “brands” instead of species or any other words used to place lifeforms within a specific group. I think, almost twenty years later, I still have that note somewhere in my house.
The book by Neil Shubin was easy to read because I have been reading about the topics mentioned for more than twenty years. I am not a biologist, geneticist, or paleontologist. I have no degrees in those fields. I am self-taught because I found it interesting to learn.
I am not sure what to say about the book. He mentioned evolution and development (Evo-Devo), Hox genes, and jumping genes. He talked about the body plans of different organisms and the changes and possibilities required of DNA to form new species. He brought up the history and accomplishments of different scientists.
He talked about his own research and explorations as a paleontologist and his discovery of a transitional fossil between fish and amphibians, which he named Tiktaalik (Actually, indigenous people of the Arctic region named it). Research that was mentioned in his book Your Inner Fish.
This book contained nothing entirely new to me. I enjoyed the review of the history and science and was pleased to be able to listen to an audiobook at the gym without becoming lost due to a lack of understanding of the scientific details. I will add that writing science fiction requires, I think, learning about various science topics, and this book is part of my research.