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Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor. Neil Shubin
by
Neil Shubin (Goodreads Author)
Details on a Major New Discovery included in a New AfterwordWhy do we look the way we do? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered "Tiktaalik," the "fish with hands," tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our h...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
January 1st 2009
by Penguin Books
(first published January 1st 2008)
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This really was a pleasure – another book recommended by Wendy – although what I liked most about it was possibly not the most obvious things about the book. From very early on I was in a bit of a world of my own and had started to wonder what to make of the fact that palaeontologists tend to make such wonderful science writers?
I’ve said it before, but I think Gould is a better writer than Dawkins – and that is a big statement for me, as I tend to prefer an English voice over an Ame...more
I’ve said it before, but I think Gould is a better writer than Dawkins – and that is a big statement for me, as I tend to prefer an English voice over an Ame...more
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This book delivered exactly what I wanted: an explanation of evolution from fish (and before really) to man in layman's terms, but not moron layman--well-spoken layman. I had so many 'ah-ha!' moments while reading this book that my head began to spin a little, but in a good way. For instance, when I used to think about evolution the hardest part for me to wrap my mind around was the slow progress of body parts morphing from one form to the next. What this book enlightened me to was that it's not...more
There are lots of titles out there in American bookstores that see the need to defend the idea of evolution from the claims of creationism and intelligent design. But this book is not one of them. Shubin assumes that you accept evolution to be a fact about the world and gets on with it. He is a fish paleontologist who teaches first year medical students anatomy at the University of Chicago. If that sounds strange, it won’t so much after you’ve read his book. Paleontology and comparative anatomy ...more
This is a very important book that not only updated my knowledge on the current state of comparative anatomy in relation to evolutionary biology but also kept me turning the pages in absolute fascination. I almost read it in one sitting because I couldn't bear to put it down. No one who reads this could possibly have any doubts about the relatedness of all of life or the fact that we carry the evolutionary history of more than just humans inside us. I found the writing style less than elegant, b...more
I really enjoyed this exploration into our human body and how it reveals pieces of our evolutionary ancestors.
You certainly don't need a science degree or much of a biology background at all to follow the steps from gills to ears or larynx. I would have appreciated more detail and a little less hand waving, but that's my inner scientist showing through.
He had a very detailed bibliography, with not just titles he drew on and others to explore, but commentary on why they mi...more
You certainly don't need a science degree or much of a biology background at all to follow the steps from gills to ears or larynx. I would have appreciated more detail and a little less hand waving, but that's my inner scientist showing through.
He had a very detailed bibliography, with not just titles he drew on and others to explore, but commentary on why they mi...more
Update 12/2009: Shubin and I have just released 40 figures in this book as a deck of PowerPoint slides with the hopes that educators across the country will be able to use them in their lectures on evolution and biology. They're available for free on the Tiktaalik website: http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/book-tools... Hope they're useful!
Review from 12/2007: Keep an eye out for this book's release in January of 2008. I worked extensively with the author while he was writing it, and wa...more
Review from 12/2007: Keep an eye out for this book's release in January of 2008. I worked extensively with the author while he was writing it, and wa...more
Shubin, a paleoichthyologist, tackles major trends in the water-to-land-to-bipedalism transitions with a good sense of humor about the whole ordeal. For the lay anatomy enthusiast, this book does an excellent job of summarizing shared anatomies and evolutionary scenarios while not getting bogged down by terminology. Particularly enjoyable is his manner of incorporating modern medical maladies with an evolutionary perspective on the human body. For the more advanced student, chapters on middle...more
This book spoke to my biology background. I was fascinated by the anatomical structures that are similar in humans and other animals. Good information and illustrations without being overly academic.
evolutionary biology is an endlessly fascinating subject, and shubin's exploration is remarkably accessible and engaging. i wonder, however, whether creation scientists (outdoing even the most oxymoronic), when not cursing the incontrovertibility of the fossil record, recoil moreso at the thought of having emerged from the selfsame primordial ooze as all other living things, or at the notion that if they accede to the logic of evolution then the remainder of their reasoning will suddenly appe...more
Archaeology, anatomy, evolution...these are not things where I am well versed to give a thoughtful review, but since I've insulted this work with two stars, I should explain: I was awaiting the chapter that would make me reconsider myself as a fish and send me running to a swimming pool for relief - and did not find it.
Basically, this seems more like an overview of evolution and the title's idea seems like a last thought of many chapters. The diagrams are, at times, more relevatory t...more
Basically, this seems more like an overview of evolution and the title's idea seems like a last thought of many chapters. The diagrams are, at times, more relevatory t...more
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Your Inner Fish is one of the most interesting books ever written about evolution. It tells us two fantastic stories: the story of our bodies and the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever made. It's a fantastic enlightening book that tells us why we look the way we do. This 240-page book is composed of the following eleven chapters: 1. Finding Your Inner Fish, 2. Getting a Grip, 3. Handy Genes, 4. Teeth Everywhere, 5. Getting Ahead, 6...more
Your Inner Fish is one of the most interesting books ever written about evolution. It tells us two fantastic stories: the story of our bodies and the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever made. It's a fantastic enlightening book that tells us why we look the way we do. This 240-page book is composed of the following eleven chapters: 1. Finding Your Inner Fish, 2. Getting a Grip, 3. Handy Genes, 4. Teeth Everywhere, 5. Getting Ahead, 6...more
Among many reasons that make evolution of life such a fascinating subject to study, the fact that we can learn more about how we humans have become what we are today must rank close to the top. This is the basic premise behind Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish." Shubin's day job is field paleontologist, but the idea for this book came about when he taught some laboratory exercises in human anatomy. It turns out that his training in recognizing and categorizing bones of long-extinct creatu...more
There are plenty of people writing reviews about this book detailing examples of what is covered in the book, but if you are on the fence about reading it, here is what the book offers: a basic overview of phylogenetics (specifically cladistics, which tries to use novel features to determine how species are related to each other), the natural history of several important innovations in the evolution of the body plan we share with other land-based vertebrates (birds, fish, mammals), and insight i...more
(I read this on my NOOKcolor ereader. Any Adobe based ereader can access this. There are several editions of physical copies and it is on Kindle)
Wittingly or not, Shubin presents a fascinating narrative of the interlocking web of the biological world from bacteria to worms to fish to birds to mammals. Even Creationists should find this interesting, because the relationship between species can be seen as being part of a wondrous Master Plan. Died in the wool Darwinians can read it as...more
Wittingly or not, Shubin presents a fascinating narrative of the interlocking web of the biological world from bacteria to worms to fish to birds to mammals. Even Creationists should find this interesting, because the relationship between species can be seen as being part of a wondrous Master Plan. Died in the wool Darwinians can read it as...more
This book was a revelation to me. For the first time, I understand how many facets of knowledge undergird the theory of evolution. Neil Shubin didn't just find the transitional skeleton he needed to find. He found the age of rock he needed to find, the prehistoric environment he needed to find, and then began looking there for the skeleton. And after a lot of digging, he found it.
The skeptic in me says that it is awfully convenient that he was able to "find" this skeleton. Bu...more
The skeptic in me says that it is awfully convenient that he was able to "find" this skeleton. Bu...more
When I was a kid, I loved to read the non-fiction books of Issac Asimov.
I was fascinated by how things worked, be they natural of something man-made and Asimov wrote to inform the layman like me of the wonders of everything from physics to biology (and even the Bible).
Once I worked as a lowly night janitor in a Bell Telephone office. I couldn't wait for my lunch hour to run to the basement, pull up a chair and dig into what Asimov had to say on the structure of the atom a...more
I was fascinated by how things worked, be they natural of something man-made and Asimov wrote to inform the layman like me of the wonders of everything from physics to biology (and even the Bible).
Once I worked as a lowly night janitor in a Bell Telephone office. I couldn't wait for my lunch hour to run to the basement, pull up a chair and dig into what Asimov had to say on the structure of the atom a...more
This work is an excellent synthesis of current research and thinking in a variety of disciplines. Shubin draws from cladistics, geology, paleontology, functional and comparative anatomy, genetics, and embryology to paint a complete picture of why the human body looks the way it does now, and what its relationship is to the body plan of other creatures (both extant and extinct). This is a very accessible book for anyone with a basic undergraduate level of scientific literacy. Nothing was dumbe...more
Страхотно въведение в генетиката и палеонтологията, разкриващо ни теорията за еволюцията не чрез огромно количество научни факти, а през призмата на всекидневния поглед към света ...показващ ни красотата на философския светоглед в ежедневната нагласа към всичко, което ни заобикаля и към самите нас, които чрез екзистенциалното търсене, което може да бъде съпътствано винаги от чувството ни за хумор се стремим да разбулим загадките, свързани със собственото си съществуване, показващи ни изконната в...more
"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...more
How are embryos like fossils? How did we come to have the hands, arms, heads, bone structures, ears, eyes and many of the other parts we have? It turns out that homo sap is a very jury-rigged critter, an accumulation of biological compromises and re-purposed parts. One can look at fossils to see how we got from there, waaaay back there, to here, and one can also find, in comparing embryos of different species, evidence of our developmental history. DNA tells tales. Neil Shubin follows both paths...more
Using paleontology, embryology, genetics, and cladistics, Shubin delves into our evolutionary history, finding correlates to human characteristics in worms, jellyfish, lizards, insects, bacteria, and the titular fish. As a very short evolutionary primer (200 pages!), this works very well. I would have loved this at fourteen, and I'd recommend it for all curious teenagers (I'd also recommend it for all creationists who argue that there is NO evidence for evolution, but they'd never read it anyw...more
I learned a lot from this easy to read book on evolution. Neil Shubin is a paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered the infamous Tiktaalik "the fish with hands."
He has a lot to share and is very passionate about his field of study. I learned about the things I have in common with sharks, fish, tadpoles and one-celled microbes. I, personally, really enjoyed that.
My only complaint (and the reason I gave this four stars instead of five) is that S...more
He has a lot to share and is very passionate about his field of study. I learned about the things I have in common with sharks, fish, tadpoles and one-celled microbes. I, personally, really enjoyed that.
My only complaint (and the reason I gave this four stars instead of five) is that S...more
Maybe I am dense, but I missed the point of this book. A summation tying all the various chapters together would have helped. It starts with hands and arms, moves on to eyes, ears etc, but doesn't really pull it all together into an evolutionary progression. Our eyes may resemble jellyfish eyes, but what does that mean? Where is the link and what happened when we split off from that branch?
The confusion of the book is shown in a diagram of the evolution of the inner ear showing two b...more
The confusion of the book is shown in a diagram of the evolution of the inner ear showing two b...more
Neil Shubin, Professor of Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, made headlines in April 2006 with his discovery of a 375-million-year-old fossil called Tiktaalik, the missing link between ancient sea creatures and land dwellers. The reviewers, mostly science writers, embraced Shubin's popular science book, which offers a new perspective on evolution, a subject on which most people feel like they've already made up their minds. While many Americans doubt Darwinism, hardly anyone disco
...more
Neil Shubin co-discovered Tiktaalik, the "fish with hands," in 2004. This creature represents an intermediate between aquatic animals and land animals, and he uses it as a focal point for his thesis, which is that we can trace the development of the human body all the way back to prehistoric fish.
The first couple chapters feature a lot of paleontology anecdotes in order to show the reader how we learn information from fossils. Shubin is a paleontologist, so it makes sense, bu...more
The first couple chapters feature a lot of paleontology anecdotes in order to show the reader how we learn information from fossils. Shubin is a paleontologist, so it makes sense, bu...more
Fantastic! You will learn a lot of really cool, amazing things when you read this book. I learned a lot about how history and evolution play a part in how our bodies work/function; how some body parts are clear evidence of our oh so distant "past" -- as reptiles, as fish, as one-celled organisms even! We are, all of us, a veritable "tree of life". Our evolved bodies can explain as well certain diseases that we suffer; body quirks like hiccups; and why our eyes dart to the ...more
Just imagine, as tiny embryos, all of us mammals have the same floor plan, basically a tube within a tube!!! The openings at both ends are to be...you-know-what...But did you know that the technique to create a tooth, a nail, a nipple or even just a hair is the same one for all these ? What I am saying is that the DNA magic is to have concentrated formulas to their simplest elements, so that when a hair is commanded to grow, it recalls the same basic set of instructions for all mammals. These ha...more
I certainly enjoyed reading this book, although it is largely out of the realm of anything that I studied or know about from my experience. We all know something about genes – dominant, recessive, that sort of thing – but I was astounded with the connections through the development of animals, particularly the concept of the arches and the germ layers, and what they would go to form.
There is no mention of God throughout, and I expect that Shubin stayed away from that topic because it is ...more
There is no mention of God throughout, and I expect that Shubin stayed away from that topic because it is ...more
If you have a semi-extensive science background, you'll probably find this book annoyingly vague. Lots of handwaving, little in the way of explanatory detail.
If you're a fan of well-written scientific prose, you'll definitely be driven around the bend. The author was chosen to write this book because he made a terrific discovery in northern Canada a few years back -- a key missing link between fish and mammals -- not because he can write his way out of a wet paper bag. Each chapter lun...more
If you're a fan of well-written scientific prose, you'll definitely be driven around the bend. The author was chosen to write this book because he made a terrific discovery in northern Canada a few years back -- a key missing link between fish and mammals -- not because he can write his way out of a wet paper bag. Each chapter lun...more
Readable, and very interesting. Exploring the evolutionary development of life -- from cells to fish to humans, he takes basic anatomy and traces the evolutionary roots of it. Why do our ears function the way we do? How does vision work? Why do we get the diseases we seem to be prone to? How do we relate to the tree of life? Fascinating stuff. Asking questions, seeking answers, with a good smattering of human drama a long the way as researchers work on the questions: Hilde Mangold's dissert...more
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“The immediate thing that strikes you when you see the inside of the hand is its compactness. The ball of your thumb, the thenar eminence, contains four different muscles. Twiddle your thumb and tilt your hand: ten different muscles and at least six different bones work in unison. Inside the wrist are at least eight small bones bones that move against one another. Bend your wrist, and you are using a number of muscles that begin in your forearm, extending into tendons as they travel down your arm to end at your hand. Even the simplest motion involves a complex interplay among many parts packed in a small space.”
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“We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.”
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