Martin Glassner's Your Inner Fish: Chapter Seven

Your Inner Fish: Chapter Seven “Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made” (Shubin 117). Upon reading this, I had a bit of a jaw-drop moment. I admire the construction of buildings and other projects for the precision and dexterity the workers demonstrate in the making. So to imagine the creation of such articulate structures without the presence of outside forces is astounding! Animals are created though the complex cooperation of cells within, and a thought experiment revealed that our body’s components work together to make a better whole, but not all components are equal. These concepts led Neil to dedicate chapter seven to the “three great questions

To put this into perspective, paleontologists scale life’s history down to an earth year in which humans did not appear until the very last day of the calendar year. In fact, most of life has consisted of single-celled organisms. The first bodies were not even really seen until the 1920s, and when they were finally discovered, people didn’t even pay much attention, that is until Martin Glassner came around. Glassner, after observing the findings of Martin Gurich and Reginald Sprigg, proved, without a doubt, that their fossils where 15 million to 20 million years older; these fossils came from the Precambrian period, a period thought to to be absent of life. Some of these fossils resembled primitive creature such as jellyfish and sponges, but the patterns found on some of the others matched absolutely zero living creatures. In these creatures, scientists found the first levels of biological organization and thus answered the

However, when we look at the “stuff” that holds us together, things make sense. Said “stuff is very complex to explain, but in a nutshell it is talking about the molecules that allow cellular arrangement and communication possible. In order to better explain this concept, Neil decided to focus on one part, the skeleton, due to its impact on the entire structure of our bodies. He explains the bone’s structure by explaining the functions of the three basic molecules of bones: hydroxyapatite, collagen, and cartilage. Hydroxyapatite aims to maximize the bones compressive functions. Collagen, like rope, aims to maximize bones elasticity. And cartilage acts as a buffer. Together these molecules cooperate in order to give bones structure, strength, and support. This relates to animals in the sense that all “animals have molecules that lie between their cells, specifically collagens and proteoglycans.” Through the molecules, cells are able to communicate amongst each other thereby knowing when and how to change their behavior. From here, Neil is able to make a comparison between primitive creatures and creatures with no bodies. For instance, take a choanoflagellate and the specialized cells inside a sponge. At a time, most people thought that choanoflagellates were just weird sponges, but after genetic evaluation, scientists ruled that