How did he discover the first fish with legs to walk the planet?
Being a scientist has a part that humbles you and another that empowers you...
Is the salary humiliating?
It's humiliating to be surrounded by polar bears in 20 below zero hammering away at a rock you believe in. But it is just a mere 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 humbling to realize that our life is a tiny fraction of the immensity of life in the universe...
But it is.
Just because we know we are. We know that we are atoms, as Bradbury said, arrived from all corners of the universe to awaken to life on this planet and to know themselves. We are the universe that wakes up to know itself.
And you discovered the wandering fish.
I am just a handful of atoms in the chain of humans who are awakening to knowledge and the most beautiful thing is to feel the connection with all the life that has been and will be in the universe by studying the DNA already in the fossils.
Does it feel like wandering fish family?
we are family All living things that lived and will live are connected in this chain of life that we are discovering: atoms with consciousness.
Does this awareness make him an animalist?
This awareness leads me to take care of the planet, because we are the planet. We are not without the planet: neither were nor will we be without. All of this went through my head, besides being very cold, when I found this fossil, the Tiktaalik roseae, the fish that started to walk.
How did he know what it was?
Because for decades scientists had been looking for the link between fish – we were sea creatures – and man and all terrestrial creatures. And I had it between my gloves…
what did you hear
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?
And so, I am a professor of anatomy and I had taught these bones to medical students at the University of Chicago every year. But seeing that same anatomy in a fish fossil from 375 million years ago...
Brilliant! Congratulations!
I was moved, because we are this first fish that walked; created tools; he innovated... And yet, there I was too with my routines: making breakfast for everyone in a tent in the middle of the Arctic...
Saint Baron
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. It was lighting a candle in a dark room...
What does he see now that he 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 on 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 could not see him now; our brain is no longer only in the skull, it has expanded in chips everywhere, here in the cell phone that records me now there is its memory... We are cyborgs! We are ying and yang: our inventions are the ying; the rest, we are yang.
But do we evolve somewhere?
Science, first of all, doubts. It is not an eternal revealed truth, it must be reframed every time. And evolution, sorry my friend, is not going anywhere.
Aren't we better every day?
We are adapting: that's all. We don't progress, we only evolve. It is a mistake to think that we are getting better every time.
Do we just adapt to changes in the environment?
Or else we die. And to evolve and adapt is sometimes to go backwards. I speak to him with a tube that also serves to eat; before we talked it was just to eat. And that makes us snore...
Ronco: Yes, I'm human.
And standing makes our knees weak and causes hernias... Do you see how evolution is often backward?
