Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body | Neil Shubin | Making fossils rock!

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Your Inner Fish: A...

	Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body Neil Shubin Pantheon, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 79 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fascinating and in-depth science, light-hearted writing

This author has been involved for many years in key research to discover the genes and processes that shape our bodies and how these have evolved through the history of living things. I was thrilled to see a book written by him, and hoped I would not be disappointed. Instead, I am pleasantly surprised. Far from being the dry work of a research scientist, this is a bright, interesting, almost conversational work that still conveys all the science involved.

Making fossils rock!

Upon reading the preceding, uniformly glowing reviews, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe they were written by friends of the author - this is a book by a fish paleontologist, after all. But even after a few pages, I could understand the enthusiasm. This is a gem of a book. It popularizes science in the best possible sense: making the arcane not only accessible but meaningful to those without specialized knowledge. Its central message is that we all contain within our genes and anatomy a legacy of the entire course of the evolution of life. The author conveys his own sense of wonder at this realization in the conclusion, but until then allows us to gradually experience it ourselves as he brilliantly summarizes the amazing analogies in structure and development between ourselves and even the most seemingly primitive life forms. Without ever sounding a strident note, he demonstrates with overwhelming evidence not only the nature, but inherent elegance and beauty of evolution. With its concise chapters and breezy prose (including the occasional pun inserted with geeky delight: a dental vestige is an "inconvenient tooth"), this small volume magnifies the impact of its message by being a pleasure to read.

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Amazing breadth of topics for a modestly sized book

This is such a great science book that works at so many levels and perspectives; it's amazing how many different areas of evolution Shubin is able to cover in a smaller footprint book of only 201 pgs. The book is written at a level that a relatively smart higher schooler can understand, yet reports on discoveries even the most ardent follower of science will find fascinating; a rare accomplishment in terms of being able to target such a wide audience while satisfying both extremes.

The book serves as a personal memoir of Neil Shubin, project lead for the team that discovered the transitional fossil Tiktaalik Rosae. Readers gain insight to the inner-day workings of an authentic scientist. I was very impressed at the breadth of Shubin's capabilities beyond his fieldwork, which was already commonly known to casual followers of science like myself. Shubin's reportage on his personal experiences greatly enhanced my respect for the energy, determination, talent, and patience required to make a meaningful discovery such as Tiktaalik as well as the hours spent in the lab not just validating their discovery, but also developing new methods to validate fossil discoveries in the relatively new field of evo devo and providing insight on new features to look for in the field or even in the drawers of natural history museums (like Matt Friedman, who just discovered the transitional fossil between symmetrical fish and flatfish based on previous fossil finds long stored away, [...]).

The book also serves as an adventure story given the Tiktaalik discovery in the remote wilderness of Northern Canada after years of expeditions. From this perspective, I highly recommend that teachers at or above high school biology offer this book to their more promising science students as an extra credit project. Society has largely mischaracterized scientists in general and greatly underreport their contributions. Shubin does an excellent job of portraying the personal satisfaction and enjoyment of practicing science, given America's recent degradation in producing an adequate amount of young scientists from our domestic inventory of students. We need to promote more role models like Shubin to young people, similar to how we promoted astronauts in the 1960's. Other countries get it, more examples like Shubin will help us eventually get it back as well.

Shubin also reports on other related findings to help illuminate his discoveries and provide a general update on what we know regarding evolution in general and human evolution as it relates all the way back to single-cell organisms. His reporting on unicellular algae evolving into multicellular organisms within 200 generations (eight years) in the lab was one of several vignettes that helped provide perspective to the degree we've progressed in our understanding of biology. Other examples are the evolution of human eyes and Shubin's direct contributions on the evolution of our middle ear bone back through Tiktaalik to fish gill arches - both from fossil discoveries and through successful experiments performed in the lab given our recent understanding of genetics and bioengineering.

In fact, the chapter on human ear evolution is probably the most fascinating chapter given its rich history going back to the 19th century and how subsequent discoveries allowed us to continuously build upon those original findings to the point we can now physically create gill arches in primates or middle ears in fish given our discovering the gene common to both and our recent understanding of how different proteins impact fetal development. Besides a great story, this chapter provided the additional perspective of illuminating how science builds upon previous discoveries.

If you loved Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, another great science book which is how much of the public was introduced to the new field of evo devo, you'll love this book since Shubin is a primary player in the field in terms of explaining the evolution of gill arches to anthropods' upper jaws, to primate middle ears. I was impressed at the breadth of Shubin's discoveries reported in this book; from fossil discoveries in the field to providing explanation for his field discoveries at a cellular level, not to mention successful predictions of where to find such fossils, and physical validation in the lab of the evolution of the human ear middle bone evolution through his experiments.

Shubin in worthy of celebrity given his contributions. I for one am grateful for his writing this book and teaching me so much with so little investment of my time - a truly great return on investment!

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more like your inner everything

My colleague Neil Shubin did a superb job at explaining sophisticated concepts in evolutionary biology while remaining accessible and even entertaining. I had the pleasure of seeing Neil give a talk where I work, at Stony Brook University, and he is as interesting in person as he comes across on the page. This book is a much better introduction to evolution (even though it is not written with that specific goal in mind) than most other stuff that is out there. Shubin weaves his own history as a biologist with the history of how we became we, and the result is a must read for anyone interested in how science works.

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Enjoyable and informative; kinda boring in many parts though

Overall, I enjoyed this book and learned a lot. It was really fun to see the INCREDIBLE similarities between all living things that explain why we are built the way we are. Shubin did an OUTSTANDING job explaining things in way everybody can understand. The thing I think could have been better -- Shubin tells his own story quite a bit, especially in the first half ("I was a graduate student and I believed..." or "I used to go to attend such and such..."). I totally understand why he did this; sometimes telling the personal journey makes the information more interesting. But to be completely frank, it doesn't work for this book; his story is kinda long and boring, and I just wanted him to get to the real information. The book is short anyways, and I would have much preferred that he shave his personal story to 10% of its present size and instead put more on-topic information into the book. Nevertheless, definitely worth a read.

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