Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

by Neil Shubin

In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity. An exciting and accessible new view of the evolution of human and animal life on Earth. From the author of national bestseller, Your Inner Fish, this extraordinary journey of discovery spans centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity.

Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.

We have now arrived at a remarkable moment, prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, History, Evolution, Genetics, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2020

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The poet William Blake wrote of seeing "the universe in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower." When you know how to look you can see billions of years inside the organs, cells and DNA in all living things and relish our connections to the rest of life on our planet."

To those who don't believe in evolution, I would say, isn't it a greater God who could create a world where everything came from everything and would be eternally connected? Where to the end of time, the history of all beings would be, in each being, connected to the very first one? I loved this book, the ending I quoted is a 'bible' to me.

The book is either a prequel or a sequel to Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, it doesn't really matter the order but they both hang together, and they are both 10 star books, reading them has expanded my world enormously.

If you like reading science books and don't mind putting a bit of work into it (I was continually rereading passages to make sure I understood them and where they were connected to previous ideas) then these two books (and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind) are mind-expanding and since they are all very well written, very enjoyable too.

I could gush, right?
__________________

So I read Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body and was entranced by his description of how we were transformed from a fish body - starting with a neck - to our present, primate, bipedal form. This book is a marriage of palaentology and evolutionary biology. Right now I'm reading how stationary marine organisms transformed, evolved, into ... fish, and everything else.

Sea squirts held the key. They are tubes - water in one tube, nutrients sucked out, water pumped back out. Nothing much really, but like many marine organisms they have free swimming larvae. A tadpole-like stage, with a body, a notochord which is a stiffening rod and nerve tube (which will become a spine and spinal cord) and an eye. What happened, evolutionary speaking, is that some mutation stopped the sea squirt larval stage from settling on the sea bed and metamorphosing into a sea squirt and instead development took off from the tadpole stage towards free swimming fish.

Mutations are where the dna doesn't quite make a perfect copy and a gene is altered for expression, physically or by function or both. It might not be a good thing when it causes a disease or disorder, but it is the only way that evolution can work, a perfect copy of every gene would have had us all amoeba forever.

I ordered this book, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA and was reading The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language while I waited for it to come. But it was so dry, when this came I put it to one side. Right now the details of evolution excite me.

Something lovely. I've always loved Ernst Haeckel's wonderful marine animal drawings Art Forms in Nature but I didn't know that ships going on explorations carried with them artists to document their discoveries. Haeckel was a fantastic artist as well as scientist. Photography is an art unto itself, but with the coming of that, we lost something. A photograph can never interpret as an artist's drawing or paiting can.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating history of the evolution of life on earth

Evolutionary biology is one of my favourite subjects to read about. It is thrilling to see how life, once begun, was able to go from microscopic one-celled organisms to the abundance of life forms we see today. 

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA takes us on a journey from those microscopic single-celled organisms to life with all the complexities, varieties, and intelligence that abounds today. Tracing the history of paleontology, Neil Shubin explores the transformation of life forms through the fossil record. He then moves into the fields of embryology and molecular biology, relating many discoveries about evolution made since the discovery of DNA.  He shows the interconnectedness of all life forms on earth, from the humblest one-celled organisms to us humans. He explains how almost every protein in the body is a modified version of ancient life forms, repurposed to perform new functions.

Evolution is not a straight path from simple to complex; rather, it branches off into myriad forms, genetic mutation after genetic mutation. Many of those mutations are detrimental to a species and those born with them will die out before passing on their DNA. However, sometimes a mutation provides an advantage, helping that individual to have more offspring than others of its kind, and those mutations, over many generations, can bring about new species. 

It was fascinating to learn the history of genomes and the similarities in the genetic code of different creatures. For instance, the DNA that codes for gills in fish has been repurposed to develop lungs in land-dwelling creatures. The field of embryology showed how closely related we all are even before the advent of genetics. It is interesting to note how, "even though people don’t have gills, we have the swellings and clefts in our embryonic stages" and to see how with different species, old features were repurposed to bring about new organs with new uses and functions. For instance, the same genes that make hands and feet are used to make fins in fish and wings in birds.

One of the most interesting things I learned from this book is how it was the genetic material left over from a virus that eventually led to the ability of mammals to have pregnancies rather than lay eggs, and how a virus that infected one of our ancient ancestors left behind the DNA that codes for a protein that was then used to develop brains that can form memories. Mr. Shubin tells us that "by some estimates, 8 percent of our genome is composed of dead viruses, more than a hundred thousand of them at last count." I can't help but wonder what genetic material from Cov-19 might be left behind in the DNA of humans and how it might affect future generations.

Though not a lengthy book, "Some Assembly Required" is packed full of information providing proof of how life on Earth has evolved from the single-celled organisms which first appeared some 4 billion years ago. 

A few cool quotes/facts from this book

• "Humans and chimpanzees are, at the level of proteins and genes, almost identical."

• "Nearly identical species of fruit fly differ from one another genetically more than humans and chimps do."

• "Some salamanders and frogs have twenty-five times more genetic material than humans," though much of it is meaningless stretches of junk DNA.

• "Over two-thirds of our entire genome is composed of strings of repeated copies of sequences with no known function."

• "Each kernel [of corn] is a separate embryo, a distinct individual" so when you eat an ear of corn, "you are eating over one thousand genetically distinct creatures."

If you find these tidbits interesting, you will probably love this book!

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shubin explains in plain language how evolution works to achieve the seemingly unexplainable such as the development of land animals with lungs and legs from fish with gills and fins, the development of flight from land animals, and much more. Shubin, a paleontologist, recounted his discovery of an ancient fish with a neck, elbows and wrist, in a prior book Your Inner Fish which I enjoyed. Here he uses the same style, ideal for those who don’t want to get weighted down by a lot of scientific lingo.

Shubin traces the history of discovery of creatures that serve as intermediaries beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing right up to the present day. He profiles many of the scientists involved from Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt and discovered fish that breathe air to Lynn Margulis who proposed that mitochondria were bacteria originally engulfed by another microbe and suffered decades of derisive criticism before her theory became widely accepted. He highlights the dramatic change in his lifetime of techniques used to analyze specimens. He likewise transitioned becoming a biologist to take advantage of the genetic revolution in science.

Underpinning many of his examples are five words from Darwin “by a change of function.” Another quote that applies is from playwright Lillian Hellman “Nothing, of course, begins when you think it did.” Lungs didn’t develop to help animals survive on land and feathers didn’t develop to help animals fly. Fish developed swim bladders that could fill with air to help them adjust buoyancy as they changed depth in the water. Some of these became used as lungs to supplement oxygen supply when the water was deficient. Some fish have both lungs and gills. Structurally the swim bladder and the lung are similar. What changed was the function.

Recent discoveries have revealed many carnivorous dinosaurs had feathers. Feathers did not develop in dinosaurs for flight. Feathers would have served as insulation and been useful in sexual display just as in birds. Perhaps most important when combined with the hollow bones, hinged wrists and winglike arms these predators had developed, feathers would have helped propel these land animals to catch their prey. Shubin states ‘biological innovations never come about during the great transition period they are associated with.”

Salamanders give us an example of the change from a water to a land animal. The larvae have gills, finlike limbs and flat tails well adapted to their life in the water, then they lose their gills and reconfigure their skulls, limbs and tails for life on land. Some salamanders can control these changes based on their environment. If the environment is dry, they metamorphize. If it is wet, they don’t, keeping their gills and aquatic properties. The speed and length of development from embryo to adult is another way changes in features evolve. Some DNA codes for proteins and some DNA serves as a switch to turn on or off a DNA segment that codes for proteins. If for example proteins that promote brain development are produced for a longer time then a larger more complex brain will develop.

Repurposing of genes precipitates many of the changes we see in evolution. The genes that make fin rays that lie at the end of a fish’s fins are used to make our hands. New genes do not have to developed; rather old ones are modified to a new purpose. New genes are often copies of existing genes. Duplicates proliferate throughout the genome. This means one of the copies can maintain its original purpose while the others take on new ones. For example, keratin, a protein important to the development of nails, skin and hair is produced by an ancient gene that has been copied into ones modified to produce versions of keratan tailored to support each tissue type. Genes that produce proteins that enable responses to varying light wavelengths or different smells have developed similarly. It’s a common story in the genome

Our genes also come from the outside. Viruses embed themselves in our genome to reproduce. Sometimes they stay there and can be modified and put to a useful purpose. The ARC gene looks very similar to HIV. It plays a very important role in our capacity for memory. Other genes such as one that helps the placenta function efficiently also arose originally from viral invasions. There are also what are called jumping genes, genes with a propensity to duplicate and move to far distant regions of the genome where they can be employed to help direct a process in an entirely different part of our body. Shubin notes that 60% of our DNA is made up of repeated sequences produced by jumping genes and 10% came from viruses.

Shubin’s presentation covers ground familiar to those who have read books about evolution and the genome. Those who enjoy more detailed books may not find it worthwhile and while I found little new aside from some of the historical profiles, I still liked it. For the reader who would like to know more about the ideas mentioned here and many that I left out; I highly recommend it. It’s only 200 pages, well written and very accessible.

[Vik Venkatraman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strong book on biology, very credibly written by the author.

I went into this thinking that this might be a bit of pop science or otherwise fluff, and was surprised to find the depth with which Shubin explores the recursive nature of biological organization from competition at the genome level all the way up to his own personal take on the paleontology of life.

Great book, if you like science, biology, people, society, or a curious to see how things work, might be worth picking this one up.

[Paul Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this wonderful book, palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin takes us on a grand history of evolution, demonstrating how the power of progress lies not in the caricature of millions of random changes, but on the way existing structures are constantly repurposed from one use to another - from bones and body segments, to “jumping genes” that move around the genome and are co-opted into new roles, to viruses and bacteria that become absorbed into whole new organisms and allow for wholesale reinvention.


He skillfully weaves the story of evolutionary development into the intellectual discovery of these processes - from before Darwin and Mendel right up to the present day with the Crispr CAS-9 technology, drawing parallels both in the fortunate accidents that lead to progress in both, as well as the fact that of right-time-right-place, that some advancements cannot bear fruit unless conditions are right but, when they are, they are all-but inevitable.


This does exactly what a popular science book should, giving the reader a deeper understanding of the subject while being thoroughly entertaining.

[Mahvar · Rating 4 out of 5]

نیل شوبین در کتاب دگرگونی‌های بزرگ کاوشی در دل تاریخ به ریشه‌های تکاملی انسان ارائه می‌کنه، و از خلال تاریخچه آناتومی، پیوندهای عمیقی بین بدن ما و اجداد دور دست موجودات زنده نشون می‌ده. از یافته‌های فسیلی گرفته تا بینش‌های ژنتیکی، این کتاب به زبانی ساده و ملموس توضیح می‌ده که چجوری تمامی اجزای بدن ما، از ستون فقرات گرفته تا دست‌ها، ریشه در تغییرات عظیم گذشته دارن.
شوبین هنر نادری داره: اینکه پیچیده‌ترین مفاهیم علمی رو به روایتی در دسترس و گیرا تبدیل کنه. یکی از بزرگ‌ترین نقاط قوت این کتاب، تلفیق علم با مثال‌های ساده روزمره است که حتی پیچیده‌ترین فرآیندهای بیولوژیکی رو برای خواننده روشن می‌کنه. با این حال، عمیق‌ترین جنبه‌ی این کتاب، پیام آن در مورد وحدت خلقت است؛ اینکه تمام زندگی روی زمین از همان رشته‌های ابتدایی حیات سرچشمه گرفته و این زنجیره، همچنان ادامه دارد.
از سمت دیگه، ممکنه برای کسانی که اطلاعات پایه‌ای در مورد بیولوژی ندارن، برخی بخش‌ها کمی پیچیده باشه. همچنین، برخی مفاهیم کلیدی شاید به جزئیات بیشتری نیاز داشتن، تا افراد علاقه‌مند به مباحث پیشرفته تکامل هم به طور کامل رضایت پیدا کنن.
در نهایت، دگرگونی‌های بزرگ یه کتاب کامل برای کشف گذشته‌ی مشترک و درک بهتر از جایگاه ما در طبیعته. این کتاب نگاهی تازه به بدن انسان و ریشه‌های پیچیدگی‌های اون می‌ده، و خواننده رو با حسی از شگفتی نسبت به زندگی و علم به حال خودش رها می‌کنه.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neil Shubin's Some Assembly Required is not without its merits. It contains a readable and succinct primer on the progress, not of evolution, but more the gradual peeling back of layers of the complexity underlying evolution by scientists through the ages. Shubin shines his modest spotlight on some of the unsung heroes of evolutionary biology, and escorts you around the museum of evolution's history, revealing what at first seem to be quaint bits of forgotten lore, but are actually major moments of scientific discovery. Esoteric research by passionate savants on everything from salamanders and corn to shrimp and chickens prove to be vital to our modern understanding of the inner-workings of DNA. The halls Shubin lead your through are familiar if you've ever read a book about evolution. It's the valuable stuff you never noticed up on the high shelves that's the most interesting thing here.

What left me a little unfulfilled was how padded it all seemed. As previously noted, a lot of this book is a recapping, and possibly a little fleshing out of, a lot of stuff you already know. It's like the author had some really cool ideas he wanted to share, but not quite enough to make for an entire book. On the one hand, I'm glad I got to read about the cool new stuff, but grew weary at how often I had to read through the old stuff again. That, plus Shubin's modest presentation left me wanting for a bit more excitement. There are some genuinely fascinating passages, as he gets into specific mechanisms at work inside the chromosomes or some ingenious method some scientist concocted to get at the heart of a hypothesis. But those moments are sporadic and fleeting.

In the end, Some Assembly Required felt like an interesting story being told by a drowsy old professor who forgot that he already told you that part of the tale. Worthwhile, to be sure, but not told with the vibrancy and verve that such an exciting story deserves.

If this book happens to be your portal into this world, and this is your first time to hear the tale, I can imagine Mr. Shubin's tour through the history of the field of evolution might pack more of a punch.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite up to “Your Inner Fish,” but pretty darned good. He ventures into molecular biology this time, both as a writer and professionally. The results are uneven, but definitely worth reading, even if he lost me a time or two.

OK, here's the best review I saw online: https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2020...
"What Shubin gets at is that evolution takes shortcuts. Rather than inventing new traits from scratch, it repurposes existing ones. Examples Shubin gives are air-breathing in fish, which was repurposed to make lungs in land animals, and feathers on dinosaurs that originally evolved in a different context, but were repurposed for flight. Shubin has spent a research career working on our fishy ancestor, Tiktaalik rosaea, which was the subject of "Your Inner Fish."

Back already? Here's the author on your DNA: it's packed so tightly that if unwound and stretched out, each strand would be about six feet long. The DNA in all 6 trillion of your cells, if similarly stretched out, would reach almost to Pluto!

And here's Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), discoverer of endosymbosis, one of my scientific heros. She fought for years to get her ideas accepted: "I don't consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right."

Here's the WSJ review which led me to read the book. (Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
"In “Some Assembly Required,” as well as his previous popular-science masterpiece “Your Inner Fish,” the biologist Neil Shubin shows himself to be a natural storyteller and a gifted scientific communicator. This new work catches us up on the latest progress in understanding such complicated cases—and there has been a lot of it, some providing the kind of hard, tangible evidence that many scientists once thought would be impossible to find without a time machine. But a time machine is effectively what Mr. Shubin and his colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere have found by studying fossils, and by studying the natural variation that occurs in contemporary species such as salamanders."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-ass...

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neil Shubin é um cientista de mão cheia que trabalhou com fósseis transicionais, aqueles fósseis que representam bem a transição de grupos de organismos, como dos peixes para os vertebrados terrestres. Daí o seu primeiro livro, Quando Éramos Peixes: Uma viagem pelos 3,5 mil milhões de anos de história do corpo humano.

E como muitos cientistas dessa área, ele também teve que colocar um pé na água da biologia molecular, para ver como o DNA marca essa transição entre os organismos. Este livro marca essa mistura de evolução, fósseis, embriologia e como nossos genomas mostram grandes transições entre os organismos.

É um livro cheio de exemplos, história da ciência e grandes descobertas da biologia recontando como entendemos como o DNA funciona e como organismos são formados. E como isso tudo mostra lindamente grandes transições entre os animais que recontam a evolução humana. É praticamente um curso express de biologia que recomendo muito, mesmo para quem é da área, principalmente pelo panorama geral que poucas pessoas sabem passar.

[Cheenu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable and interesting book covering the "evolution" of theory of evolution. The consensus is (was?) that we evolved in a straight line from a common ancestor billions of years ago but recent new insights from sequencing of the DNA states that it might not be so straightforward after all.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly readable and very interesting book on the genetics of evolution. Some surprising (well, to me) tidbits: a substantial part of our DNA consists of captured viruses, lots of evolution happens, as was already predicted by Darwin, by repurposing a capability that is already present, jumping genes are also fun. For more info see this or this review.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Grand and Glorious Trek Towards Understanding Evolution’s Greatest Mysteries

Fasten your seat belts and allow yourself to trek across the vast expanse of Earth’s biological history with University of Chicago evolutionary developmental biologist and vertebrate paleobiologist Neil Shubin as your guide in his remarkably terse, quite riveting, “Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA”. This is the most compellingly readable recent popular science book I’ve come across, with Shubin giving readers a relentlessly remarkable and insightful account of the history of science pertaining to biological evolution, developmental biology and paleobiology, as well as how recent discoveries – especially those from Shubin’s laboratory – have greatly enhanced our understanding of the mechanisms behind the major transformations of evolution as seen from both the fossil record and the genomes of living organisms. Having studied with two of the foremost scientist writers of the past century and a half, Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin has written a book destined to be remembered as one worthy of comparison with their very best; an instant classic of popular science literature offering readers much of the same sense of grandeur and wonder and literary eloquence found in his mentors’ popular scientific writing.

If there is one major message to be taken from reading Shubin’s book, then it is an understanding of Natural Selection as a nonrandom process, in which a vast spectrum of living material from molecules to organs and appendages, has been repurposed for entirely new functions constituting major evolutionary transformations in the history of life, whether it has been the development of those traits that allowed archaic bony fish to become eventually, masters of the land and air via their tetrapod descendants, or something more minute – but no less profound – than the emergence of pregnancy in placental mammals. Shubin offers readers a view of biological evolution and the history of life that is substantially more complex, and more nuanced, than from those who mistakenly view Natural Selection as a random process; a recently published example, Columbia University physicist – and World Science Festival co-founder - Brian Greene’s “Until The End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe”, reads like a contemporary endorsement of the very “adaptationist programme” – “evolutionary just so stories” – condemned by invertebrate paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin in their justly celebrated “Spandrels of San Marco” paper. Here Shubin takes readers on a journey describing how exaptations – the term coined by Gould and vertebrate paleontologist Elisabeth Vrba in their "sequel” Exaptation paper – or rather, repurposed traits which Charles Darwin had defined as those “accompanied by a change in function” – have had in shaping the history of Earth’s biodiversity, from microbes to vertebrates.

Shubin introduces us to a cast of characters - including many whose careers seem genuinely stranger than fiction – whose contributions to evolutionary theory, developmental biology, genetics and paleobiology inspired current research in these fields and, in many cases, helped enhance our understanding of biological evolution, especially in unlocking the secrets behind such incredible evolutionary transformations as the conquest of the land by vertebrates closely related to the bony fish that developed lungs for an aquatic existence millions of years before their descendants ventured onto land or the conquest of the air by feathered dinosaurs. In the same opening chapter (“Five Words”) where Darwin’s observation on traits having a change in function was written in response to criticism by a protege of Thomas Henry Huxley’s, St. George Jackson Mivart, Shubin introduces us to the eccentric Baron Franz Nopsca, whose thinking about dinosaurs as actively running land animals anticipated John Ostrom’s, whose reexamination of the skeleton of Archaeopteryx and discovery of Deinonychus led to a radical transformation into our understanding of how most dinosaurs lived, especially the lineage which gave rise to feathered dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx, and eventually, to modern birds. In one of the final chapters (“Mergers and Acquisitions”), Shubin introduces us to the iconoclastic Lynn Margulis, who never wavered in her belief in asserting that she was right in recognizing how the eukaryotic cells of plants and animals arose through “merging” bacterial cells with different functions into one larger cell, demonstrating how Margulis’ important insight into evolutionary history has greatly revolutionized our understanding of that history.

Throughout the book, Shubin demonstrates how research into fields as seemingly dissimilar from each other as paleobiology and molecular biology have yielded similar, often identical, results towards our understanding of the mechanisms behind evolutionary transformations like the evolution of flight in some feathered dinosaurs. Such breakthroughs have been made possible through the development of new tools and techniques, from computers to gene-editing procedures like CRISPR-Cas, that were unknown to 19th and early 20th Century biologists. Shubin demonstrates that we are living in a genuinely “golden age” of scientific achievement in our understanding of the mechanisms of biological evolution and how they have shaped the course of the history of life on our planet. Much to his credit, Shubin has done this by being an exceptional storyteller capable of writing superb prose, making this journey into scientific discovery one that is as memorable and electrifying as such great works of contemporary literature like William Gibson’s debut novel “Neuromancer” and Frank McCourt’s debut memoir “Angela’s Ashes”. Shubin has offered readers a captivating journey into the history of biology and our understanding of biological evolution that most will remember long after they finish reading “Some Assembly Required”.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, but I feel Shubin writes very condescendingly about female scientists. Throughout the book he mentions mostly male scientists (discusses Watson and Crick with no mention of Franklin) and when he does mention female scientists they are interns or they had a lucky chance (read: don't really deserve to be there). His male scientists are brilliant, and geniuses while his female scientists just happen to be in the right place at the right time. There are plenty of notable scientists of both sexes involved in the history of evolution, genetics, and DNA sequencing. Shubin's patronizing writing about female scientists irked me.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good things first. They are~
1. The writing is very lucid and logical, without becoming frivolous or egomaniac.
2. Almost the entire history of study of evolution and the keystones in terms of genetics have been touched upon.
3. Several women scientists and pioneers, whose achievements had been overlooked by contemporary academia, get due recognition in this book.
The bad~
There is absolutely nothing new here for us, who have already covered the terrain through the works of Zimmer et.al. Infact, thanks to the hype about this book I came to realise one basic thing. The Bible-belt Trumpist rednecks have put the study of evolution under tremendous stress in U.S of America. That's why the East Coast celebrity press tries to blow every book on Evolution out of proportion by declaring it as THE book. This one is good, but there's nothing great here.
Nevertheless, study of evolution and genetics always helps, especially if the book is so well-written.
Recommended.

[Taha Rabbani · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب با عنوان «دگرگونی بزرگ» ترجمه و منتشر شده. اپلیکیشن طاقچه با هشتاددرصد تخفیف گذاشته بودش. خریدم و بیش از همه از ترجمه‌ی روانش کیف کردم. معلومه انتشارات مازیار، که تابه‌حال کتابی ازش پخونده بودم، در زمینه‌ی ترجمه‌ی کتاب‌های علمی ید طولایی داره.
من بدون داشتن دانشی درباره‌ی زیست‌شناسی (در حدی که درست تفاوت بین ژن و ژنوم و... را نمی‌دونم) تونستم کتاب را تموم کنم و لذت ببرم. کتاب روایی است، یعنی به‌صورت مخاطب‌پسندی نوشته شده و تاریخچه‌ی کشفیات و تحقیقات در زمینه‌ی ژنتیک را تعریف می‌کنه، ولی به‌نظرم سیر تاریخی‌اش کاملاً خطی نیست و بعضی جاها وقتی از پیشرفت‌های پژوهشی یکی تعریف می‌کنه انگار مستقل از پیشرفت‌هایی که قبلاً تعریف کرده داره صحبت می‌کنه.
به‌هرحال، به‌نظرم برای اینکه کسی بخواد جذب بحث ژنتیک بشه و شروع به مطالعه در این زمینه بکنه کتاب بسیار خوبی است.

[Craig Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that will either reinforce one's views of the accuracy of what has been teased from nature concerning the working of evolutionary processes, cause one to examine what they think they know, or stimulate those who do not understand or even who might have in the past rejected biological evolution as being possible to again delve into the field.
Abounding in vignettes of the discoveries and the temerity of those who spent their professional lives in the pursuit of portions of the inner working of organism, of cells, of the DNA molecule, Dr. Shubin's text is clean, clear, and immensely comprehensible.
A must for old biology majors like me and for those who want to have an intro into the subject.

Note: My first read of this was right after the book was released in early 2020, and have just completed a re-read in May 2022.

[Igor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ніл Шубін - палеонтолог, який відкрив тіктааліка, потенційну "проміжну ланку" між рибами та амфібіями, що описано в його давнішій праці "Внутрішня риба". Тут він продовжує теми з тієї книжки: як нові органи еволюціонують зі старих через зміну функції, як ДНК вказує на спільне походження несхожих частин тіла несхожих тварин тощо. Власне, у відгуках нарікують на те, що тут він багато повторюється. Але я надто давно читав "Внутрішню рибу", тому мені було в будь-якому разі цікаво, тим більше що автор пише простою мовою і заодно розповідає історії з життя біологів. Крім "старих" тем, тут також є про найновіші відкриття з генетики, включаючи технологію CRISPR-Cas9. Певна відсутність фокусу і цілісності розповіді в другій половині книжки погіршує загальне враження, але несуттєво.

[mrym · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely adore reading science books for pure enjoyment, not because they're required for school

Starting this book i was against Darwins hypothesis however as I delved into each chapter i started having second thoughts which seems crazy honestly!! AND halfway through, I found myself leaning towards belief in evolution (not fully convinced tho)

It's been thrilling, interesting, and downright enjoyable, I just wish I had come across this book before tackling evolution in school

[Kostas Hitchens Pap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Το καλύτερο βιβλίο για φέτος και όχι μόνο .
Ως λάτρης της εκλαϊκευμένης επιστήμης και ειδικότερα της βιολογίας αυτό το ανάγνωσμα με καθήλωσε .
Το ίδιο βέβαια είχε καταφέρει ο Neil Shubin,O άνθρωπος που ανακάλυψε το Tiktalik ,με το προηγούμενο του βιβλίο "Το ψάρι μέσα μας "
Εδώ λοιπόν αυτός ο μεγάλος εξελικτικός μας ξεδιπλώνει την ιστορία των ανακαλύψεων σε διάφορες πτυχές - κλειδιά της εξελικτικής θεωρίας .
Μορφολογία,εμβρυολογία ,απολιθώματα ,κάθε ανακάλυψη επιβεβαίωνε η και εμπλούτιζε την πανέμορφη και ίσως πιο σημαντική ιδέα που σκαρφίστηκε ανθρώπινος νους .
Κοινή καταγωγή ,κληρονομικότητα ,φυσική επιλογή ,εξέλιξη
Κομμάτια παζλ που ενώνονται και φτιάχνουν το δέντρο της ζωής .
Ενα απολαυστικό ταξίδι με όσο τεχνικές πληροφορίες χρειάζονται σε τέτοιες περιπτώσεις.

[Ula Tardigrade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genetics, while fascinating, can be a tough subject for a good popular science read - too technical and requiring a lot of knowledge. Fortunately, Neil Shubin has a gift for explaining even the most complicated things in a clear and simple way. Some parts of this book were still a challenge for me but overall the effort was worth it. I was familiar with many of the ideas from other publications but here you will find many of them assembled in a consistent story. Highly recommended for anyone interested in evolutionary biology.

[Owlseyes]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/n...

[Olivia Conway · Rating 5 out of 5]

kind of a greatest hits of evolutionary biology. communicated very well and thoroughly engaging.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a wonderfully accessible book on a seemingly esoteric subject, that being the four billion years of genetic mutation and adaptation that has powered evolution from (relatively) simple single-celled organisms to the diversity and complexity of life we see today.

Very frequently, commentators and critics of this field of study have seen the entire mechanism of this backwards. Laughingly bringing up the uselessness of wings in flightless birds like penguins...until they see them swim. Bizarrely questioning why such a finely evolved creature as the human male would have useless nipples...when it turns out that evolution works in efficiencies and it is in fact much simpler to evolve humans who all have this appendage, though only functional in half the population. This has been previously called, "a strange inversion of reasoning." As Dan Dennett has remarked, "exactly!"

This work from Neil Shubin chronicles the history of genetic modification and how our contemporary understanding of genes, genetic mechanisms, DNA, and evolution at the genetic level. This interest was spurred by Darwin's famous reply to early critiques of his work failing to explain how various functional appendages could have been formed from ancestors who would have had no use for them. The adaptation was possible not through a change of organs, but, "by a change of function."

Those who read regularly on evolution may not find a great deal of new material here, however the chronological narrative that Shubin has put together makes for a wonderful history of our understanding of genetic mechanisms and the figures behind their discovery which have not only allowed us to confirm the observations of Darwin and others but have now allowed us to create our own mechanisms (CRISPR as an example) to directly edit this genetic content. Wonderful reading

[Nancy Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

A luscious book! By the author of Your Inner Fish which is also one of my favorites.
Author Neil Shubin explains how our genome codes for our development. It's not just a blueprint! It's more of a recipe. Like an egg is an egg, but boiling it, frying it or scrambling it result in very different kinds of breakfast. And throw one in a cake and it becomes cake.
Like somebody wound up inside a cell and became enslaved for perpetuity...she and all the offspring she would ever produce went from being a wee independent organism to a cog in the machine from which would spring all animal life.
(I'm on a roll now...) This little organelle and her entire family have been responsible for providing energy to all our cells for the past gazillion years and yet have stubbornly retained their very own genome. Mitochondria, of course. This is not the whole gist of the book of course; I just always get hung up on the whole"I Contain Multitudes"/Lynn Margulis stuff.
In addition somewhere along the line we have snared viruses, stripped them if their individuality and put them to work ... Shubin explains how these viruses made pregnancy possible. It's complicated but amazing.
"Every complex cell has 2 families of life inside it, one of its nucleus and another whose ancestors were once free-living blue-green algae or bacteria."
The book talks about a lot more than that. Science history, paleontology, parallel evolution and lots on genetics. Well written, scopey and absolutely nothing not to like in this book. Just read it, OK? Because there is really no way I can write a coherent review on insufficient doses of coffee and a husband playing "Delta Dawn" repeatedly in my ear.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think "emphatic", the word of the decade, appears in this book. This is weird. Show me another book written in the last 10 years that doesn't contain "emphatic".

What does appear in this book is evolution. A lot of it. In fact, it's entirely about evolution. But it's not the usual evolution stuff you learn in school. It's cell and molecular (DNA) level evolution. And even though I have a largely vestigial undergrad degree in cell and molecular biology, there was a lot of new material in this book for me. I especially enjoyed the parts about embryos. If you want to know the particulars of evolution, for instance, how we think multicellular organisms developed from unicellular organisms (not the endosymbiotic theory), or how life went from aquatic to terrestrial, you need to read this book. One really interesting theme in evolution, and possibly this review, is that things don't start when we think they do. Read to find out exactly what this means! I really recommend this book for the information that it contains. It answers a lot of specific questions that I didn't even know I had.
The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because, to me, biology alone is a thumb. A big, beautiful, useful thumb. But when we add history to biology, in my mind, the thumb shrinks to a pinky finger (this makes more sense if you have read the book).

[WaldenOgre · Rating 4 out of 5]

这本书很适合拿来和《基因传》配套着读。

可以先读《基因传》，以便厘清基本概念，了解人类对基因的逐步发现与认识的过程。然后再来读本书，了解生命进化过程中的一些关键性的疑问与决定性的发现。

这两本书一读完，连我这个门外汉都觉得遗传学极其迷人了。它不但特别重要，也不只是前途光明，更重要的是无比有趣。因为生命及其演化机制本身，就是一出变幻莫测、高潮迭起的精彩戏剧啊～

[CatReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating books by scientists of many stripes (biochemists, microbiologists, zoologists, anthropologists, molecular paleontologists, physician-scientists) about genetic deduction of evolution have become a subgenre in themselves in recent years, so by the time I got around to reading Neil Shubin's excellent addition to the genre, the concepts were no longer new but nonetheless fascinating.

Recommended further reading:
Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott
Humaninal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature's Most Paradoxical Creature - a New Evolutionary History by Adam Rutherford
Biography of Reisistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens by Muhammad Zaman
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen
Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by Jonathan Losos

[Rhea · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was really intrigued by the way in which shubin introduced each of the scientists. by starting off with their personality quirks, i was able to better visualize their motivations and thus better remember their contributions to biology. however, i found this book slightly hard to read as i read it over a period of several months. shubin tends to refer back to things from previous sections of the book a lot without any additional information which made me confused at times if i hadn’t read that part in a while. so he might want to include footnotes or just additional explanations in the future!

~3.5 stars

[Kevin Warman · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 to 5 stars! When I think of how science books should be written, I naturally think of Neil Shubin's style and insight. His work is both engaging and packed with valuable information. I found his section on the interplay between genes in the genome to be most interesting. However, there were times I wished more details were provided to help me understand the biochemistry in action.

As an aside about the author, I wrote to him to thank him for his contributions to science and he wrote back!!

[Dan'S_mind]

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...