Illinois Authors

The Illinois Center for the Book banner

Neil Shubin

Born: December 22, 1960
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Shubin lives in Chicago and teaches at the University of Chicago.

Biography: Neil Shubin is an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago along with being the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is well known for his discovery of Tiktaalik roseae.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Website: http://pondside.uchicago.edu/oba/faculty/shubin_n.html


Selected Titles

Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
ISBN: 1101871334 OCLC: 1102175942

Pantheon 2020

"The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish, now gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life, that enable us to further understand whether our presence on this planet is an accident or inevitable. The great transformations in the history of life brought about whole scale shifts in how animals live and how their bodies are organized: the evolution of fish to land-living creature, the origin of birds, the beginnings of bodies in single-celled creatures. Shubin describes how over the last half-century, scientists have been able to explore how genetic recipes build bodies during embryological development--how these inventions and adaptations occur in a nonprogressive manner in different contexts, at different speeds. Paleontology has been transformed over the last 50 years by tools and techniques of molecular biology--and it is that revolution in our understanding of the evolution of life that Shubin traces here. Each of us is a mosaic of precursors that came about at different times and places, with deep rooted connections across species that Darwin, for all he understood, could never even have imagined"--

The universe within :
ISBN: 0307378438 OCLC: 783520721

Pantheon Books, New York : ©2013.

Shubin shows how the entirety of the universe's fourteen-billion-year history can be seen in our bodies as he moves from our very molecular composition (a result of stellar events at the origin of our solar system) through the workings of our eyes.

Your inner fish :
ISBN: 0307277453 OCLC: 144598195

Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.--From publisher description.

 

 

Accessibility