Neil Shubin

“... two little patches of tissue essentially control the development of the pattern of bones inside limbs. A strip of tissue at…

— Neil Shubin

“In areas close to the ZPA, where there is a high concentration of this molecule, cells would respond by making a pinky.…

— Neil Shubin

“All the genetic switches that make fingers, arm bones, and toes do their thing during the third to eighth week after conception.”

— Neil Shubin

“My building was constructed in 1896, and the utilities reflect an odd design that has been jerry-rigged further with each renovation. If…

— Neil Shubin

“So here is the trick to designing a new fossil expedition: find rocks that are of the right age, of the right…

— Neil Shubin

“Our hundreds of useless olfactory genes are left over from mammal ancestors who relied more heavily on the sense of smell to…

— Neil Shubin

“The retina absorbs the light via sensitive light-gathering cells ... In humans these cells make up about 70 percent of all the…

— Neil Shubin

“Some fish, for example the lungfish, have the one bone at the base. Other fish, for example Eusthenopteron, have the one bone–two…

— Neil Shubin

“The key to tooth development is that an interaction between these two layers of tissue, an outer sheet of cells and an…

— Neil Shubin

“The molecules that allow microbes to catch their prey and hold on to them are likely candidates for the molecules that form…

— Neil Shubin

“In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.”

— Neil Shubin

“Whole batteries of genes are turned on and off during fly development, and this pattern of gene activity serves to demarcate the…

— Neil Shubin

“The first hard hydroxyapatite-containing body parts were teeth. Hard bones arose not to protect animals, but to eat them.”

— Neil Shubin

“Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human.…

— Neil Shubin

“Our body dries out with every passing year; newborns are about 75 percent water, not much different from an average potato.”

— Neil Shubin

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…

— Neil Shubin

“Over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.”

— Neil Shubin

“Fossils are one of the major lines of evidence that we use to understand ourselves.”

— Neil Shubin

“In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless. - Dwight D. Eisenhower”

— Neil Shubin

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

— Neil Shubin

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…

— Neil Shubin

Each galaxy, star, or person is the temporary owner of particles that have passed through the births and deaths of entities across…

— Neil Shubin

“Ideal to pre-serve fossils are sedimentary rocks: limestones, sandstones, silt-stones, and shales. Compared with volcanic and metamorphic rocks, these are formed by…

— Neil Shubin

“Fully 3 percent of our entire genome is devoted to genes for detecting different odors. Each of these genes makes a receptor…

— Neil Shubin

“opsin is a kind of molecule that conveys information from the outside of a cell to the inside.”

— Neil Shubin