How did you discover the first fish with legs growing on the planet?
Being a scientist has a part that humiliates you and another that empowers you...
Is the salary humiliating?
It's humiliating to be surrounded by polar bears at 20 below zero hammering a rock you believe in. But it is just a pure hypothesis, that there may be traces of some fossil that lived hundreds of millions of years ago where we are now.
So why do you do it?
It is even more humiliating to realize that our life is a tiny fraction of the immensity of life in the universe...
But it is.
Just because we know who we are. We know that we are atoms, as Bradbury said, coming from all corners of the universe to awaken to life on this planet and know ourselves. We are the universe that wakes up to know itself.
And you discovered the walking fish.
I am just a handful of atoms in the chain of humans who awaken to knowledge and the most beautiful thing is to feel the connection with all the life that there has been and will be in the universe by studying the DNA already in the fossils.
Do you feel like a family with the walking fish?
We are family. All living beings that lived and will live are connected in that chain of life that we are discovering: atoms with consciousness.
Does that awareness make you an animalist?
That awareness leads me to take care of the planet, because we are the planet. We are not without him: we neither were nor will be without him. All that went through my head, in addition to being very cold, when I found that fossil, the Tiktaalik roseae, the fish that was beginning to walk.
How did you know what it was?
Because scientists had been searching for decades for the link between fish – we were marine creatures – and man, and all terrestrial creatures. And I had it between my gloves...
That felt?
It was like looking in the mirror and humanity with me, because there were our arms and legs, the first, in embryo...
Did you recognize them?
Hell, I'm an anatomy professor and I had shown those bones to the University of Chicago medical students every course. But seeing that same anatomy in the fossil of a fish from 375 million years ago...
Bright! !! Congratulations!!
I got excited, because we are that first fish that walked; created tools; he innovated... And yet, there I was too with my routines: preparing breakfast for everyone in the store lost in the Arctic...
Holy man.
Thus, expedition after expedition, for six years. And, back home in the laboratory, the routines of measuring, classifying, hours in front of the computer... But I noticed that something had changed in me. I realized that I was the privileged being of the privileged species who for the first time could see the past and see himself in it. It was lighting a candle in a dark room...
What do you see now that you can tell us?
Through Darwin's lenses I see in DNA the connection between human and fish and worm and bacteria... An immense tree that connects past, present and future.
Where are we going?
The past tells us why we are the way we are and why, sitting all day in front of a screen, we suffer from obesity and diabetes, because we did not evolve to sit, but to run across the savanna... We no longer hunt because there are supermarkets... Food everywhere.
Are we going somewhere?
We are creating technology that replaces evolution. Without my glasses I couldn't see him now; Our brain is no longer just in the skull, it has expanded into chips everywhere, here in the cell phone with which it records me is now its memory... We are cyborgs! We are ying and yang: our inventions are the ying; the rest are yang.
But did we evolve somewhere?
Science, above all, doubts. It is not an eternal truth revealed, it must be rethought every time. And evolution, I'm sorry, my friend, is not going anywhere.
Aren't we better every day?
We are adapting: that's all. We don't progress, we just evolve. It is a mistake to think that we are getting better.
Do we only adapt to changes in the environment?
Or else we perish. And evolving and adapting sometimes means going backwards. I talk to him with a tube that is also used for eating; Before we spoke it was just to eat. And that makes us snore...
Ronco: Yes, I'm human.
And walking upright makes our knees fragile and causes hernias... See how evolution is often a delay?
