- When
taken over millions and billions of years it is quite easy to see how new,
novel features appear in populations. There are thousands of examples of this. These
are novel traits that appeared in the human population. Due to selection over
time, those traits will become more and more prevalent in the population.
- Shubin
makes it very clear in this chapter that Tiktaalik is a wonderful
intermediate between fish and their land living descendants, but the odds of it
being our exact ancestor are very remote. It is more of a cousin than an
ancestor. No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered
“The Ancestor.”
- Another
interesting point that Shubin makes is that much of the relationships and
knowledge about basic evolution are so strong, that for all intents and
purposes, they are facts. This is why you don’t find recent works talking about
common descent or natural selection. There are hundreds to thousands of papers,
reports, and experiments that support these claims. Many of them are a hundred
years old or more.
- Humans
are unique forms of hominids. We are in the larger group of primates, sharing
many of the characters of primates, including some mistakes in our genes. We
are mammals. There is no fundamental difference between our hair and the hair
on dogs or whales. We are chordates. Again, this is a fundamental feature of
our anatomy. We are animals. We are multicellular, without cell walls, and
cannot manufacture our own food. We are a living thing, and like every other
living thing on the planet, we respire, we use chemical energy, we respond to
our environment, we are made of cells, we have information stored in nucleic
acids, etc.
- Shubin ends with a large list of the faults
of the human body, from swollen knees to hernias. There are many, many more
besides what he lists in the book to. These are all things that are easily
explained by common descent.
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