109. Neil Shubin — Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2020

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth — a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. 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. 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. Shermer and Shubin also discuss:

Darwin’s consilience of inductions (convergence of evidence) from multiple lines of inquiry
how a scientific theory can gain acceptance without an underlying causal mechanism (evolutionary theory before DNA)
what scientists should do with anomalies unexplained by the prevailing theory
Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny? (What can we learn about evolution from embryology?)
What is epigenetics, anyway?
the best explanation for the origins of life
how information can increase in a genome
from microevolution to macroevolution: why creationists are wrong
Are there hopeful monsters in evolution?
Punctuated equilibrium and what it was like to be Steve Gould’s TA
women in science, then and now
What it’s like to do a paleontological dig north of the arctic circle? and
Martian paleontology.

Neil Shubin is the author of Some Assembly Required, Your Inner Fish, and The Universe Within. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. He lives in Chicago.

Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	before I introduce today's guest.
0:02.0	I want to tell you about the offer from our sponsor,
0:04.1	The Great Courses, this month,
0:05.8	is a free month of access to the Great Courses Plus
0:09.8	app.
0:10.5	So it looks like this, you have your phone or whatever device you're using you touch on the app like that boom and the courses pop up
0:17.6	There's a whole variety of them really hundreds that you can access so let's say you're interested in taking this one the
0:23.6	black death which is what I'm currently listening to and the 24 different
0:28.8	lectures pop up now if you're already in the course the lecture will just pick up wherever it is you last left off which is a nice feature or if you just want to skip around like say you want to skip from lecture 2 to lecture 13 medieval theories about the black death you just touch on that
0:44.1	boom and a little summary of the lecture pops up yeah so you can read about whether you
0:48.8	want to listen to it or not and then when you're ready listen to it you just hit play
0:52.4	and you're off and running.
0:54.0	Now if you don't want to do that and you decide you want to change courses in the middle, you can just do that.
0:58.0	Here's a course I already took, understanding the dark side of human nature. This is 24 lectures by Daniel
1:04.8	Briar. Anyway you get the idea. So the offer this month is a free month of
1:09.7	access to the Great Courses Plus and to do that go to the Great
1:15.6	courses Plus.com slash salon. That's the Great Courses Plus
1:20.8	dot com slash salon. Thanks for listening. My guest this week is
1:26.1	Neil Schuben. His new book is Some Assembly required, decoding four billion years of life from ancient fossils to DNA, which just
1:36.9	came out this week. Dr Schubin is the author of Your Inner Fish, which most of you
1:42.1	will likely be familiar with, it a best selling book and also made into a three hour three part
1:48.0	PBS nova series which was really good his other book before that was The Universe Within. He's the Robert R. Bensley professor of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Shermer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.