39 Quotes by Neil Shubin

Like a sixty-year-old person on actuarial charts, the habitable Earth is three-quarters of the way through its calculated life expectancy. Earth is about 4.57 billion years old, and the laws of stellar physics tell of another billion years before the sun expands to the point that it bakes the possibility for life off the planet.

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

Look at the first arch in a human and a shark, and you find a very similar state of affairs: jaws.

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

We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.

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 of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.

Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made.

North America and Europe are getting farther apart by 1.5 centimeters per year. Australia is heading for Hawaii at about 7 centimeters per year. The plates on our planet move about as fast as hair grows on our scalps.

كل صخرة على وجه الأرض لها قصة،قصة ما كان عليه العالم في حين كانت تلك الصخرة تتشكل،وداخل الصخرة هناك دليل على المناخات،والعوامل المحيطة الغابرة،التي عادة ما تكون مختلفة إلى حد كبير عما هي اليوم.أحيانا يكون الانفصال بين الحاضر والماضي أكثر حدة.