Summary

Shubin began his professional association with academia when as a college student in the early 1980s, he volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He enjoyed the weekly seminars that sometimes devolved in shouting matches. Shubin shrugged off taxonomy – the cataloguing of species – as mundane and unexciting. He later understood that their debate was over the most important concepts in all of biology. It has led to the development of methods that can be used to trace our lineages, nab criminals with DNA evidence, understand the AIDS virus, and track the spread of disease.

Every living creature had a predecessor parent and is a modified descendant of that parent. An individual may resemble his father or mother but he is a modified version of them and they are a modified version of their parents. Science provides...