Neil Shubin - The Universe Within

Palaeontologist and professor Neil Shubin, author of The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People, was recently a guest at the RSA. This is the audio of his presentation, complete with audience questions.

Here is a brief description of the book:

From one of our finest and most popular science writers, and the best-selling author of Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of years ago embedded inside each of us? 

In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin delved into the amazing connections between human bodies—our hands, heads, and jaws—and the structures in fish and worms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. In The Universe Within, with his trademark clarity and exuberance, Shubin takes an even more expansive approach to the question of why we look the way we do. Starting once again with fossils, he turns his gaze skyward, showing us 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, Shubin makes clear how the evolution of the cosmos has profoundly marked our own bodies.

Interesting book - nice discussion.

The Universe Within

31st Jan 2013

Listen to the audio

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Thursday

Professor Neil Shubin, one of the world’s most distinguished palaeontologists, visits the RSA to reveal the extraordinary evolutionary and cosmic adventure of the human body.

Against the epic backdrop of billions of years of evolution from the Big Bang, humanity's place in the cosmos can look tiny and insignificant. But, as Professor Shubin reveals, the one place where universe, solar system and planet merge is inside our own bodies.

Join Neil Shubin at the RSA to discover how in every one of us lies the most profound story of all - how we and our world came to be.

Speaker: Neil Shubin, Robert R. Bensley Professor of Anatomy at the University of Chicago and author.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA