Your Inner Fish: 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body

April 23, 2010

2nd Gregor Stoddard Visiting Professorship in Neonatology, featuring Neil Shubin, PhD

Neil Shubin, PhD

Robert R. Bensley
Distinguished Service Professor
The University of Chicago

The 3.5 billion-year history of the human body is contained in every organ, cell and tissue inside of us. Consequently, telling the story of this history means understanding the fossils and the DNA of all our cousins in the living world, from other primates, to worms, even fish. We can even use the tree of life to make predictions on likely places to find fossils that tell us of our history. One such expedition, in the Canadian Arctic, revealed fossils that lie at the cusp of the transition between fish and land-living animals. But these fossils do not just tell us of some odd branch of the evolutionary tree: they reveal our past when our ancestors were fish. Seeing fossils like these reveal the deep connections we have to the rest of life on our planet. The legacy of this past is carried in many of the diseases suffered by modern humans.

*At this time, archived videos are not approved for continuing medical education (CME) credit.

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