“For thousands of years, mankind considered itself the pinnacle of life’s creation on a planet sitting in the center of the universe. Science changed that perception. Leavitt, Hubble, and others helped us see that we live near the margin of a vast galaxy, in a universe of galaxies, with our planet one of many worlds. Darwin and the biologists had their say too. Our entire species is but one little twig on an enormous tree of life filled with all life on earth. But each discovery that moves us from the center of creation to some obscure corner brings an entirely new relation between us, other species, and the entire universe.”
NS
More by Neil Shubin

“Everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened.”

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“The order of fossils in the world’s rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life.”

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“Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals.”

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“Do the facts of our ancient history mean that humans are not special or unique among living creatures? Of course not. In fact, knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the rem...”

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“Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the on...”

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