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 | Most fascinating read

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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 78 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Shubin's Majestic Trek into the Human Body, Billions of Years in the Making

"Your Inner Fish" truly merits ample praise for being one of the best-written books on science I've read in years. It also ranks easily as an early, leading candidate as one of the finest books published this year. In clear, concise, and quite vivid, prose, this marvelous terse tome recounts in spectacular fashion, the incredible saga of the evolutionary history of our human body. Vertebrate paleobiologist and anatomy professor Neil Shubin is our enthusiastic, expert guide through this amazing journey into our body's primordial past, weaving with utmost brevity, a most compelling, and intricate, tale from fossils, genes and developmental biology. A fascinating trek through these aspects of evolutionary biology that represents too an intriguing personal scientific odyssey from a novice graduate student to a seasoned scientific veteran of major field expeditions in search of rare, often unique, vertebrate fossils across the globe and of substantial laboratory work in evolutionary developmental biology. In short, in terse, exquisite, well-written, prose, Shubin demonstrates the deep evolutionary connections that unite humanity not only with other mammals, but with other vertebrates too, and indeed, as well, with a veritable tree of life.

Most of Shubin's succinct chapters are devoted to the evolutionary history of both the human body plan and its major organs, such as the eyes and teeth. The opening chapters briefly explain man's kinship with other vertebrates, and recount the unexpected discovery by Shubin and his team of Tiktaalik, the earliest known transitional fossil between fish and tetrapods (land-dwelling vertebrates, including us). These are followed by an extremely short, quite lucid, introduction to the relevance of genetics in evolutionary developmental biology research (Chapter Three), in which Shubin clearly traces the evolution of limbs from fins to bird wings, and finally, human hands. Succeeding chapters include those devoted to the evolutionary history of teeth (Chapter Four), eyes (Chapter Nine) and ears (Chapter Ten). However, the two most intriguing chapters are those devoted to the development of the vertebrate body plan (Chapter Six) - drawing upon both classical embryology and modern molecular biology and genetics, emphasizing the importance of Hox genes - and the evolutionary developmental history of multicellular animals (Chapter 7), culminating in a terse discussion of the Precambrian Ediacaran fauna. Shubin concludes this fascinating little volume with an intriguing discussion (Chapter 11) of human ailments ranging from hiccups to hernias and obesity, demonstrating how these have their origins in our distant evolutionary past, as far back as four hundred million years ago. Without a doubt, "Your Inner Fish" will delight not only students - and others - interested in evolutionary biology, but also those seeking a deeper understanding of both human anatomy and medicine from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

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Most fascinating read

In July of 2004 paleontologist Neil Shubin and his team discovered a fossil that bridged the gap between fish and land-living animals. It was, and is, the fossil equivalent to a gold mine, a missing link in evolution. The real story begins much earlier.

Actually, there are a few different stories involved in this book. There is Neil Shubin's personal story of a life in paleontology and biology. There is the story of the human interest in how we are designed, and why, and how that relates to other species. Encompassing all of that is the observable physical history of evolution. Shubin is generous enough to treat readers to the highlights of all of these.

I found this book eminently readable, interesting, eye opening, educational, and actually fun. It made digging for fossils in often unpleasant conditions sound like fun. Suddenly scientific discoveries were exciting. Most of all though, for someone who unquestioningly accepts that we evolved from monkeys, the knowledge and understanding of how humans evolved from fish was a revelation. All of this is done with an impressive ability to build steppingstones of information, teach without overwhelming, and infuse a surprising sense of humor.

I am grateful not only for Neil Shubin's work, but his ability to pull past and present information together in a way that even a science dunce (me) could understand.

Armchair Interviews says: Author is PhD at University of Chicago in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

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Go Fish!

A great read - thoroughly entertaining and packed full of interesting information and observations from a life of fossil digging. Great first step on the path to science for the Creationist crowd.

your in fish

To put it simply, a great book on our anceint past. Shubin most be a wonderful teacher, this book is easey to read and just under 2 hundred pages. If you really want to know how you came-to-be GET IT!

Your Inner Fish

This is really a neat little book. It is very basic and should be an easy read for anyone with some anatomy education. The author writes in a accessable manner, as if he is having a friendly converstation with you. My only criticism is I would have liked to see more detailed illustrations. I recommend it if you want to get a glimpse into the evolutionary origin of the anatomic innovations that we take for granted, like having a head, two arms and two legs.

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