The Incredible Unlikeliness of Human Beings

 

The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being  – a masterful (shouldn't that be mistressful)? account of why our bodies are the way they are, by Alice Roberts

You're not that different from a mouse. Or a fruit fly. These were the great discoveries of biology in the 20th century, which saw the alignment of some of the ultimate ideas in the history of ideas. Evolution by natural selection was resolved with the nature of inheritance via genetics. And then came the revelation that DNA is universal in living things – we share the same code and, in many cases, the same genes with distant evolutionary cousins.

Through the mean of DNA human are more closer related to the Gorilla that the Gorilla is to the Ape, you get the ( disturbing  idea for some), I am sure,

Witness SCIENCE at its most brilliant with the embryological gene Pax6, whose role is to decree where an eye is going to be, in all species that have eyes. Astonishingly – and brilliantly – researchers took Pax6 from a mouse, and stuck it in a fruit fly whose own Pax6 was broken. Lo and behold, the fly's error was corrected and it grew eyes. Fly eyes, not mouse eyes. 

We had begun to understand the evolutionary building of creatures. Alice Roberts's wonderful new book could easily be called How to Build a Human, as it takes these grand unifying ideas of biology and synthesises them into a manual of development from conception to birth. Each one of us starts our tenure on Earth as a single cell, and ends up as 100 trillion (or so), all specialised for function. Roberts skilfully and knowledgeably weaves embryology with genetics with anatomy with evolution with zoology with history to build up a picture of the growth of a baby. Along the way, she asks – and provides the current best theories for – questions that you might never have considered: why do we have heads? How has two-leggedness radically altered our bodies

It is in comparative anatomy that this book really shines; that we can use the structure of a shark's gills to know our own voice boxes; the subtle but defining differences in the musculature of simian hands; the importance of the fate of cells in the developing hagfish and humans

Roberts  appetite for clashing with the tiresome, relentless zombie arguments of creationists is renowned.

e Incredible Unlikeliness of Being is published by Heron Books (£19.99). Click here to buy it for £15.99 with free UK p&p