
Decoding four billion years of evolutionary mysteries, Neil Shubin's acclaimed work reveals how ancient viral infections shaped mammalian placentas and human brains. Praised by paleontologist Steve Brusatte as "an engrossing account from a brilliant scientific storyteller at the height of his talents."
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Here's a puzzle that stumped scientists for generations: How could a fish possibly evolve to walk on land? The transformation seems impossible-you'd need legs instead of fins, lungs instead of gills, and entirely new ways of feeding and reproducing. What good are legs if you can't breathe air? But evolution rarely works the way we imagine. The secret lies in a simple truth: biological innovations don't emerge when we need them. They appear long before, serving completely different purposes, waiting to be repurposed. Lungs existed before land animals. Feathers evolved before flight. And limbs developed before anything walked. Our bodies are museums of repurposed parts, each telling stories of ancient creatures that lived millions of years before us. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his scientists discovered something extraordinary: fish that could breathe air. The bichir possessed both gills and air sacs connected to its throat, allowing it to gulp oxygen through holes in its skull. Later explorers found similar creatures in the Amazon and Australia-air-breathing fish that had existed globally for hundreds of millions of years. This discovery shattered assumptions about evolution. We assumed lungs evolved for land, but they actually originated in water. Fish developed air-breathing organs not to survive on land but to endure oxygen-poor ponds and swamps. The swim bladder-that balloon-like organ helping fish maintain buoyancy-and lungs develop from identical genes budding from the gut tube in embryos. They're the same structure serving different purposes. When ancient fish eventually crawled onto land, they weren't inventing something new. They were simply using equipment they already possessed in a different environment.
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Creato da alumni della Columbia University a San Francisco
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Creato da alumni della Columbia University a San Francisco

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