"Your Inner Fish" was published in 2008 and of course I had to buy it. Neil Shubin found the fossils of fish that were obviously a transitional species between fish and land animals. Even more amazing he was able to predict these fossils would be found on a Canadian island near the Arctic Circle.

http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20080331_Shubin/

In his new book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Shubin expands his scientific inquiries and poses some striking questions about what evolution from our ancestor the fish really means. The human body, he says, is nature’s attempt to turn a Volkswagen Beetle into a hot rod. No matter how you tweak it, the product will be far from perfect.

“Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems,” Shubin wrote in the book. “We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price.”

What we have, says Shubin, is a body struggling to adapt—like a fish out of water.

And the result is everything from obesity to hemorrhoids. By examining a breathing apparatus that began with gills and slowly transformed into a larynx and tongue, we can begin to understand why sleep apnea occurs. A perfectly designed body would not have the mouth leading to both the trachea and the esophagus, a structure that makes it easier for us to choke on our food.

Shubin, who is also Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, looks at our sedentary lifestyle and traces the causes of many diseases to our watery past. He raises questions about how to better adapt our bodies for our upright lifestyle. His book has sold foreign rights to 13 countries and made bestseller lists worldwide.