Blowing it up
In the first chapter, Neil talks about the first important discovery he had made and how it happened. Neil tells the reader that he was searching in a site that was destroyed in order to build a new railroad and there he found an extremely important fossil that made him want even more to study the complex process through which fish developed limbs and began living on land. Ironically, a destructive process such as blowing up a site is linked with the discovery of an important fossil and with the discovery of a missing link between two important periods in history.
The biggest findings are not in the field
An ironic idea is that the most important discoveries are not made in the field but rather in the laboratory where the fossils can be properly analyzed with the right equipment. Shubin learned this after discovering a few fossils that at first appeared not to be extraordinary but that after careful examination proved to be extremely important for the scientific community.
The easiest way to see it
Shubin talks about the complexity of the human head and the human nervous system and notes how it is extremely difficult to understand it and analyze it. He notes, ironically, that the perfect time to analyze the human head and nervous system is when the baby is still in the embryo stage and when the human brain is not yet fully developed. This statement is ironic because it implies that the best way to study the organ is to study it before it is fully developed.
Similar to those who have no heads
At the end of the fifth chapter, Shubin notes that, ironically, humans have something in common with worms, and the thing they have in common is the head. The reason why this statement is ironic is because worms do not have heads and because at a first glace the two species have nothing in common at all.
Not as everyone believed until then
In the sixth chapter, Shubin talks about the way science looked at the evolution of the animal species and how for a long time they believed that the evolutionary process took place in the womb. Shubin shows that this is not true and that in fact almost every living being is the same at an embryo level and then develops into different things as time progresses.
