Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year-History of the Human Body
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Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish. Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest--enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm. The Barnes & Noble Review I wish I had chanced upon Neil Shubin's captivating guided tour through "the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body" while recovering from my hernia-repair operation. The pain might have been momentarily mitigated by Shubin's revelation that the tendency of the human male to herniate "results from taking a fish body and morphing it into a mammal." In short, whereas the gonads of our ancestor the Ur-shark were safely tucked away in its torso, evolution prompted those of humans to drop down, resulting in a congenital weakness in the abdominal wall. Shubin's simple yet powerful method is to trace the intricate marvels of the human body as it currently exists through a survey of all those creatures whose DNA contributed to our own Darwinically mandated creation. As a paleontologist and professor of anatomy, Shubin is the ideal person to bop back and forth from fossils to genes, from the Devonian swamps to the genome-deciphering laboratories of today. The mechanics of evolution, inheritance, and bodily structures and organs are elegantly laid out, as Shubin draws on both milestone scientific research and his own considerable fieldwork. Aided by his facility for sprightly metaphors (cartilage is memorably described as a piece of Jell-O banded by collagen ropes), Shubin's prose goes down as smoothly as that of Stephen Jay Gould, as he earnestly conveys his appreciation for the often phantasmagorical and ironic results of Darwin's dead hand on our kludged-together organisms. But the crucial subtext is more profound: all artificial and troubling distinctions and divisions among humans disappear in light of our common heritage. Our intimacy with the rest of creation, he implies, should always be uppermost in our minds. --Paul DiFilippo
Preface ixFinding Your Inner Fish 3Getting a Grip 28Handy Genes 44Teeth Everywhere 60Getting Ahead 81The Best-Laid (Body) Plans 97Adventures in Bodybuilding 116Making Scents 139Vision 148Ears 158The Meaning of It All 173Epilogue 199Notes, References, and Further Reading 203Acknowledgments 215Index 219
