My guest today, Neil Shubin, is a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

He's made breakthrough fossil discoveries, like finding the missing link between fish

and land animals, known as Tiktolic, and he's a leading popularizer of science through

his best-selling books, your inner fish, the universe within, and some assembly required.

My lab meetings we go back and forth from fossils to embryos to DNA, but the problems

are pretty much the same, right?

Out of fish from all over the walk on land, that's really how bodies are built, how bodies

can evolve.

What are the forces behind that?

Welcome to People I mostly admire, with Steve Levitt.

One thing I find fascinating about Neil Shubin is that more than 30 years ago, he picked

a question to study, how did animals transition from water to land?

And he's devoted his life to that question, mastering what

it seems to be an almost impossibly broad set of skills along the way.

He's not just an old-fashioned fossil hunter, he's also become an expert in anatomy and

in cutting edge molecular biology.

So does your fossil hunting take you to a lot of warm, sunny places?

I wish.

My summers are typically pretty cold, because we end up going to polar places.

We go to the Arctic in our summer, and in the austral summer we'll go to Antarctica.

And I usually go into the field to answer particular questions about the history of life.

So that hunt takes us to, it's taken us to all seven continents, but most recently

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