We Are All Made of Stars…
Author: Neil Shubin
I hope this doesn’t make you feel old, but every hydrogen atom in your body – its most abundant atom and a key constituent in every protein and DNA molecule – is about 13.7 billion years old. Formed shortly after the Big Bang, hydrogen atoms have been slowly cycling throughout the universe, combining to create other elements and building stars, planets and people. If these kinds of deep science thoughts get your intellectual juices flowing, I’ve got a splendid book for you, The Universe Within.
With this work, author Neil Shubin – a paleontologist at the University of Chicago – has penned a companion to his first book, Your Inner Fish, which explores how the human body contains countless traces of all its evolutionary predecessors. In this book he takes the idea even further, revealing how the history of the universe and our planet has directly shaped human biology.
Starting with the Big Bang and proceeding on to several subsequent astronomically and geologically significant milestones, Shubin explains how each momentous step has impacted human evolution. He goes so far to claim that if Jupiter was closer to the Sun, humans would be taller and that if the Atlantic Ocean hadn’t starting forming 200 million years ago, mammals may never have been evolutionarily successful. Our bodies as they are today contain all sorts of evidence of these ancient seemingly random and unrelated events.
Peppering the book with entertaining stories from his search for early mammals in rocky outcroppings in the
Alfred Wegener, the father of continental drift
Arctic, Shubin writes in a light-hearted and easily readable style. He skillfully explains all sorts of complicated topics – astrophysics, plate tectonics, oceanography and geology – without getting bogged down in minutiae. At the same time he includes detailed discussions about the research and researchers who have solved so many of these scientific mysteries.
In the end, The Universe Within is an entertaining exploration of the interface of astronomy and geology with biology. It may be hard to believe, but we may owe much of our humanity to fact that the Himalayas are tall and that Antarctica is cold. Chock full of similarly astonishing ideas, I can strongly recommend this book for any and all science geeks.
— D. Driftless
- Best Non-Fiction of 2016 - February 1, 2017
- Little Free Library Series — Savannah - May 22, 2015
- Little Free Library Series — Wyoming - November 30, 2014
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