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

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!

I'll first give my take on the book then provide a brief summary. Author Neil Shubin is an awesome man and author. His personal anecdotes came at perfect times and flowed with the book in harmony. His writing style is congenial, conversational, humorous, candid, and i'd go as far to say inspirational. Prospective readers - especially those who aren't enthralled by evolution or anatomy - might predetermine the text as being bland and heavy. It's quite the opposite; I found myself laughing many times and perhaps the only weakness of the book is that it's too short. I personally enjoy shorter books because I enjoy delving into a few different topics a month. For only 200 pages there is a hell of a lot to learn and so much great information jam-packed in an easy-to-understand way. The author is an acute articulator, and has a good habit of recapitulating unfamiliar topics. This is an unconventional evolution book. Scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously said "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". This could have been the name of this book. Having read numerous evolution books before, I would have thought that attaining higher appreciation for it than I already have was an unattainable goal, but reading this book shattered that notion because my appreciation for evolution is substantially heightened. Nothing is more enlightening than finding out the truth of your existence up to your very faults. The book is split by 11 chapters. The first four explore the theme of how we can trace the same organ in different creatures. I'll briefly summarize: - Chapter 1-4: The author starts by describing his legendary trip to Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. He describes the struggles and the significance of his finding: The Tiktaalik; a creature from the late Devonian period (375 million years ago) that currently holds as the most well-established evolutionary transition from fish to amphibian. I've read about the Tiktaalik before in one of Dawkin's books, but I was surprised to find out that the author of this book actually discovered it. His expedition is a fascinating read in itself because the author is a great storyteller, and seems to be a really humble, laid-back, and fun guy. He all of the latter not only when sharing his personal experiences, but when speaking on behalf of his chosen subjects as well. He describes how he ended up near the arctic - and on the Pennsylvania highways - when looking for his fossils of choice. He gives a general introduction of where and how - using paleontology and evolution - you would find fossils. He elucidates the difference between fish and amphibian (through bone structure and limbs) and mammal and reptile. There's a chapter dedicated to teeth. Teeth are important and extremely helpful when identifying or distinguishing differences among animals (i.e. reptiles and mammals). There's a chapter dedicated limb structure, specifically the hand and arm. The developmental difference between our arms and a fish's fins are very similar early on in development but become vastly different through the process (inside the egg). The author explains why and shows experiments involving the relevant genes for such functions (those involving the ZPA tissue and Sonic Hedgehog gene manipulation, there's a chapter to this called "Handy Genes"). - Chapter 5-11: In each one of these chapters, certain body parts of ours are to our distant ancestors. In other words, we get to explore, interpret, analyze, compare and contrast the our body functions with our distant ancestors. We figure out the inception of many body parts (and functions) and why they evolved to work the way they do for us. Specifically, there's a chapter on: the head, entire body, scent, vision, and ears. Some interesting stuff by chapter: In the field of Embryology, - the study of Embryos, or fetuses - we see that all animals are alike at their very initial gestation stage, with four little swellings called arches that develop around what comes to be the throat area. This is explained in more detail in the book but the fascinating thing is that these arches, depending on the species, all come to have a different but similar function in the body as the conception process gets underway. In the book, the example of comparison are humans and our very distant ancestor shark. Cranial nerve structure is also discussed and compared. Also discussed are headless animals - primitive ones - and the origins of our notochord. There's a whole section on the similarity of active (and inactive) genes among completely different specifies. What happens if you remove tissue, or add certain DNA strands in fruitful area? The evolution of scent is interesting because fish evolving to leave the water and thus become an amphibian, it requires major changes because there are 2 kinds of smelling genes: one for water and one for air. The chapter on scent is epic and so is the proceeding one on vision and then Hearing. We can trace major events in our eyes by analyzing certain eye genes that we share with other creatures. Mammals have the same ear bones as fish, the difference being that wish don't have ears. We come to see that there's major contrast between the functions of these bones for different groups of animals, like mammals and amphibians. These differences are part of why we label an animal to be a "mammal" or "amphibian" in the first place. Our middle ear bones are the malleus, incus and stapes. We come to see that the malleus and incus evolved from jawbones. Of the million years of life, Homo Sapiens have survived extinction and for the time being remain extant. But this doesn't mean that we don't have our problems. There's no preternatural creator ghost behind the complexity or susceptibility of our bodies, but even better: an evolutionary explanation of everything in our body from our genetic workings to our genotypes. Because of such primitive origins, our bodies aren't fully accustomed to certain things and thus thanks to our fish ancestors we develop things like hernias or hangovers. So why is this better then? For one, because it makes perfect sense! And two, by having a natural understanding of our anatomy, we can spearhead our way into the understanding of imperative issues - like disease or congenital defects - that shackle and sometimes terminate the life of many good individuals. This is very important, and so is this book. I'm grateful I read it.

Very comprehensive and beginner friendly, but a lot of the paragraphs are quite literally the same thing uttered in slightly modified sentences, sometimes in the same words. I’ve been pitting it off for a special occasion for over 6 months at this point, and my only regret is that I didn’t read it sooner: the book is very easy to read (although I have scientific background, so take it with a grain of salt), and was so engrossing that I finished it in one go. “Your inner fish” touches on a lot of the topics of particular interest to me: paleontology, ontogeny, physiology, zoology, genetics, microbiology; so I definitely had a real blast reading it, even though I had already known most of the things discussed here. Always a pleasure to read science books that have a character

Your Inner Fish est le best seller de Neil Shubin, le livre qui l'a fait connaître au grand public. Et pour cause : c'est un très bon ouvrage de vulgarisation sur la théorie de l'évolution. A partir de la découverte d'un fossil, Tiktaalik, Neil Shubin nous emmène dans un voyage à travers les âges pour nous montrer comment notre corps est l'héritier de millions d'années d'évolution. Cet ouvrage est facile à lire et propose la synthèse de nombreux domaines des sciences, de l'anatomie à la paléontologie, en passant par la génétique, tout en rendant accessible au lecteur non scientifique les derniers développements autour de cette fameuse théorie. C'est un excellent livre pour aborder l'évolution. Je précise que la lecture de ce livre en anglais est relativement simple et ne demande pas énormément d'efforts pour qui connait un peu l'anglais.

Faaaahk yeah dude! Si ud busca callarle la boca a su amigo/a, conocido/a o familiar sobre su absurdas creencias nacas religiosas creacionistas, utilice a Hitchens, Dawkins o este libro. Muy recomendable!

Muy interesante para saber uno de los pasos de nuestra evolución con los fósiles encontrados en forma de pez.

Very simple and straightforward book, even high schoolers could enjoy it who have basic biology knowledge.

This book is a fascinating view on the evolutionary legacy of the human body. How much we (and other related animals) owe our current body design to ancestors in the past. Evolution works by modifying what already exists, so one can usually trace the evolutionary history of species by tracing their body plans. Animals that share similar body plans tend to be related to each other. That doesn't mean similar forms (that's convergent evolution), it means they're built out of the same materials, using the same methods. The latter point is quite important, as that relates to DNA, giving us a second method for examining evolutionary history- compare the DNA of the organisms, with an eye towards the building genes. Overall, this is a fascinating book and a good example of solid science. I enjoyed reading the book, and found that it was suited to academics and general audiences. Shubin has done a very good job in making a fossil fish from the arctic turn into a fascinating story that's well worth the read. If you ever want to give a skeptic evidence on human origins and the evolution of species, this book also does that very nicely. Well done Dr. Shubin.