“It was often hard for me to do both things,” he said. On his first teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania, he pursued both field expeditions and laboratory work. “But I loved expeditionary paleontology too, going out searching for fossils, so I always made time for that,” Shubin said. His doctoral thesis was on how cells come together to make a limb, a hand or a foot. Shubin went into developmental biology, a then-emerging field involving the use of powerful new laboratory-based tools to follow evolutionary pathways of modern living organisms by studying their DNA. His success is no surprise at all to me.” It was unusual to have an undergraduate so deeply interested, and he was so busy on his own with so many projects. “Of all the students in that class,” Tattersall said in a telephone interview, “Neil is really the one I remember.

He was so intrigued, Shubin said, that he became “a real pain in the butt” to Tattersall, hanging around after class and showing up during Tattersall’s office hours to badger him with questions. He had planned to become a veterinarian but then, as a freshman at Columbia University, took a class taught by British paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, a renowned expert on human evolution. Shubin, the son of noted crime novelist Seymour Shubin, graduated from high school in Philadelphia. Of course, I believe nobody should dictate their beliefs to me either.” “I see science and religion being in two different spheres, so I am very careful that I never, ever tell people what to believe in. “I didn’t want to write a diatribe condemning creationists. “I wanted to take the high road and show the joy, beauty and power of science,” he said. Though his writing underscores the evidence for evolutionary theory, Shubin does not directly tackle the argument between scientists and religious creationists who insist “intelligent design” is a credible alternative. “I wanted to tell the story of the human body from the really deep, ancient stuff - fish, worms, jellyfish, sponges and those sorts of simpler, more primitive life forms,” Shubin said recently as he showed off his genetic laboratory on the Chicago campus.

Evolution your inner fish