Neil Shubin

A flat-headed fossil fish with a neck and something like a wrist, dug out of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, made Neil Shubin's name. Tiktaalik roseae sits close to the point where vertebrates came onto land, and Your Inner Fish in 2008 traced parts of the human body back through creatures like it. Some Assembly Required, published by Pantheon in 2020, asks a harder question: how big changes happen at all, when evolution has no plans. His answer runs through repurposed parts, duplicated genes and stretches of viral DNA that ended up doing jobs nobody designed them for. Shubin is professor of organismal biology and anatomy at Chicago and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.