Book description
In The Universe Within, Neil Shubin, one of the world's
leading experts, reveals to us the extraordinary cosmic and
evolutionary adventure of our own bodies.
During the past 13. 7 billion years (or so) since the Big Bang, our
universe has evolved, stars have formed and died and our planet
congealed from the matter in space. For aeons, the earth has circled
the sun while mountains, seas and entire continents have come and
gone. Against this epic backdrop, humanity's place in the cosmos can
look tiny and insignificant. But as Neil Shubin shows in this
revelatory new book, the one place where universe, solar system and
planet merge is inside your body. Shubin shows how the origin of the
Moon is tied to our internal body clocks; how the vast amounts of
water on Earth and inside all living creatures crossed the deepest
stretches of space to us; how strange fluctuations in the orbits
within our solar system have led to our irregular ice-ages; and how
tiny imbalances in the chaos immediately after the Big Bang can
explain why matter exists at all.
Delving below the earth's surface and into the frozen Arctic,
exploring the smallest atomic structures and the vast reaches of
space, Neil Shubin uncovers a sublimely beautiful, almost magical
truth: that in every one of us lies the most profound story of all -
how we and our world came to be.
'Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully
lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher
... a science writer of the first rank', Oliver Sacks
Neil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his
mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils
around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the
key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of
expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He
trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently a Professor
in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University
of Chicago. His previous book is Your Inner Fish: The amazing
discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor.
Neil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his
mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils
around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the
key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of
expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He
trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently a Professor
in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of
Chicago.
