Interview with a writer: Professor Neil Shubin

Following in the footsteps of the great tradition of paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, and evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin, professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has spent a considerable part of his career discovering fossils around various parts of the world. These have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution. He famously discovered tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million years old fossil fish, in Canada in 2004. This discovery provided valuable data in helping us understand how fish evolved into land animals. 

In his latest book, The Universe Within, Shubin shows how the origin of the Moon is tied to our internal body clocks and how tiny imbalances in the chaos immediately following the Big Bang, can explain why matter, and human beings, eventually came to life. Shubin posits that what lies within the bodies and minds of every human being, has its roots in the crusts of the earth, the water of the oceans, and in atoms in celestial bodies.