In multicellular life all of the cells must be interconnected with intricate process that keep them alive and supplied with energy and other resources. This is one of the reasons why unicellular life proliferated well before multicellular life. Shubin states: “Here’s a humbling thought for all of us worms, fish, and humans: most of life’s history is the story of single-celled creatures. Virtually everything we have talked about thus far—animals with hands, heads, sense organs, even body plans—has been around for only a small fraction of the earth’s history. Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year… Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae... The first human appears on December 31(Shubin 158).” The novel obviously focuses on the evolution of the humans body. However, Shubin does a remarkable job of keeping everything in perspective and highlighting just how anthropocentric we are. It is important to highlight the sheer number of species that came before us, because we are merely a conglomerate of remarkably similar DNA and morphological features.
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