Some Assembly Required Quotes

“Якщо розкрутити ДНК з кожної з чотирьох трильйонів клітин вашого тіла й утворити з них одну нитку, то ваш особистий ланцюг ДНК дотягнеться майже ло Плутона”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Recall that genes are stretches of DNA folded and coiled in on itself to make chromosomes.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Existing genes and networks of them can be pulled off the shelf and modified to make remarkably new things. Using the old to make the new extends to every level of the history of life—even to the invention of new genes themselves.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“New experiments reveal a multibillion-year history filled with cooperation, repurposing, competition, theft, and war. And that is just what happens inside DNA itself. With viruses continually infecting it, and its own parts at war with one another, the genome within each animal cell roils as it does its work in generation after generation.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Ніщо ніколи не починається саме в той час, який ви вважаєте початком: попередники з'являються раніше, ніж ми собі уявляємо, і зовсім в інших місцях.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Duméril’s magical enclosure”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The implication was clear: lunged, air-breathing fish were global and had been living on Planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Here was a fish that had both gills and an organ that allowed it to breathe air. Needless to say, this fish became a cause célèbre.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The reason fish with lungs didn’t move to land earlier than 375 million years ago was that it was inhospitable until then. Plants, and the insects that followed them, changed everything; ecosystems now were habitable for any fish with the ability to spend short periods on land.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Land plants first appear in the fossil record about 400 million years ago, and insect-like creatures soon thereafter.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“on the other hand, the inventions are already there, doing something else, a simple repurposing can open up new pathways of change. This capability for change is the power of Darwin’s five words.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The major revolution from life in water to life on land didn’t involve new inventions. It involved changes in inventions that had come about millions of years before. If history were a single path of change, where one step led inexorably to the next, each with a gradual improvement for a single function, major changes would be impossible.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Nature is like a lazy baker who crafts a bewildering variety of concoctions by repurposing, copying, modifying, and redeploying ancient recipes and ingredients.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Ever twisting, turning, and at war with itself and external invaders, DNA provides the fuel for evolution’s changes. Ten percent of our genome is made up of ancient viruses, and at least another 60 percent consists of repeated elements made by jumping genes gone wild. Only 2 percent is made up of our own genes.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Creatures with bodies—animals, plants, and fungi—are relative newcomers to the planet, and they are all composed of cells derived from the merger of different individuals.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Traits can appear in one species only to be borrowed, stolen, and modified for new uses by another. Hosts can inherit a ready-made invention rather than having to build it themselves. Combinations of parts, and the new kinds of individuals that can emerge from them, can open up evolutionary opportunities.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The mitochondria that power our cells were not invented by changes to our own genome, when our ancestor was a single-celled creature. They were invented elsewhere, then taken in and reused as those ancient bacteria merged with our lineage.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The genome is the stuff of B movies, like a graveyard filled with ghosts. Bits and pieces of ancient viral fragments lie everywhere—by some estimates, 8 percent of our genome is composed of dead viruses, more than a hundred thousand of them at last count.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“The individuals with the virus were the recipients of a biological gift. The virus was hacked, neutered, and domesticated for a new function in brains. Our ability to read, write, and remember the moments of our lives is due to an ancient viral infection that happened when fish took their first steps on land.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“That is what Lynch found with his switches: each of the switches that made decidual stromal cells had a special sequence that looked for all the world like it originally came from a jumping gene.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Jumping genes are the ultimate selfish elements—they can duplicate and jump to spread and multiply across the genome. Lynch was finding that, on occasion, jumping genes can carry useful mutations that do dramatically new things.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“For vision, olfaction, breathing, and virtually everything else animals do, duplicate genes make it all happen. Almost every protein in the body is a modified duplicate of an ancient one, repurposed for new functions”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Plant breeders realized early on that by breeding plants with entirely duplicated genomes, the offspring will sometimes have extra sets of chromosomes and be more vibrant or tastier. Nobody knows why, but some think the extra genetic material is put to new uses to make growth and metabolism more robust.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“While the sizes, shapes, and numbers of bones may differ in creatures that use wings to fly, flippers to swim, or hands to play piano, this one bone–two bones–little bones–digits pattern is always there. It is a grand anatomical theme, an ancient pattern that underlies the diversity of every creature with a limb skeleton”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“All limbs, from frogs’ legs to whales’ flippers, have a similar skeletal pattern. Each has a single bone at the base, the humerus.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Recall that when genes are active, they make proteins. To manufacture proteins, they use another molecule, RNA, as an intermediary.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Ever twisting, turning, and at war with itself and external invaders, DNA provides the fuel for evolution’s changes. Ten percent of our genome is made up of ancient viruses, and at least another 60 percent consists of repeated elements made by jumping genes gone wild. Only 2 percent is made up of our own genes. With cells and genetic material of different species merging and genes continually duplicating and repurposing, life’s history flows more like a braided and meandering river than a straight channel.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“By the mid-1980s, [Stephen Jay Gould] had emerged as a major public figure, using his background as a paleontologist to dive into controversies with radical stances on the ways new species emerge and how evolutionary change comes about. His [popular history of life] college class was composed of around six hundred students who, taking it as a distributional requirement, were unlikely to become science majors. This audience proved an ideal focal group for Gould to try out his new theories and presentations. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the fall he held forth, lecturing with dramatic flourish to undergraduates who either sat rapt in the front rows or sprawled sleeping in the rear ones.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“Gene sequences that code for proteins compose less than 2 percent of the human genome. That leaves some 98 percent with no genes at all in it. Genes are but islands in a sea of DNA.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

“They called them Sasquatch, after the big-footed creature of the paranormal world.”
― Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA