A Washington Post review and a customer review of "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin."

I have about 7 books about evolution. This is the best one.

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

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Barbara J. King

For the first time, Americans have the chance to meet an ancient ancestor. Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old, human-like fossil from Ethiopia, is here on tour. For the next six years, you can visit her at museums across the country and stare into the mirror of your own past.

But in Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin describes a fossil named Tiktaalik that makes Lucy's time on Earth seem like just yesterday. At 375 million years old, Tiktaalik (which means "large freshwater fish" in Inuit) sports a curious mix of features that mark it as an evolutionary milestone, a "beautiful intermediate between fish and land-living animals." In its fossilized bones, we see a flat head and body, a functional neck and other features that presage what's to come, all mixed in with fish features like fins and scales. Most surprising of all, Tiktaalik has a wrist joint. "Bend your wrist back and forth," Shubin instructs his readers. "Open and close your hand. When you do this, you are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik."

Shubin, a paleontologist and professor of anatomy, made the astounding discovery of Tiktaalik, the first find of its kind, with colleagues in the Canadian Arctic in 2004. He has clearly fallen in love with this ancient fish, and conveys its significance with both precision and exuberance. "Seeing Lucy," writes Shubin, "we can understand our history as highly advanced primates. Seeing Tiktaalik is seeing our history as fish." In fact, Shubin wants us to see our history not only as primates and fish, but also as insects and worms. Exploring the 3.5-billion-year history of life on Earth, Shubin says, will yield a deeper grasp of how our bodies came to be what they are. "Inside our bodies are connections to a menagerie of other creatures. Some parts resemble parts of jellyfish, others parts of worms, still others parts of fish. These aren't haphazard similarities. . . . It is deeply beautiful to see that there is an order in all these features."

Shubin, then, turns Tiktaalik the ancient fish into a poster fossil for the elegant connections across all life-forms on our planet. This evolutionary continuity, so basic to biology, paleontology and anthropology, is the real message of the book. Shubin reveals its practical applications: The better we understand the long history of our joints and organs, the better we will be able to treat trauma and disease in our bodies.

Genes are the co-stars, with bones, of Your Inner Fish. As Shubin puts it, "DNA is an extraordinarily powerful window into life's history and the formation of bodies and organs." When scientists make a fly that lacks a certain gene, the fly's midsection is missing or altered. Frankenstein-like research of this nature helps scientists to understand more about how genes influence developmental processes. Yet how relevant is such research for understanding human development, which unfolds according to rich interaction between our genes and our environment? It's hard not to wince when thinking about the subjects of this DNA-altering lab work.

Nevertheless, Shubin's melding of fossil and genetic data is deft, and it prepares us for his central conclusion. Our lives reflect the evolutionary principle of descent with modification: "Looking back through billions of years of change, everything innovative or apparently unique in the history of life is really just old stuff that has been recycled, repurposed, or otherwise modified for new uses." How our senses work, why we get sick and even why we get the hiccups can be explained by this principle. For instance, hiccups are inherited from fish and tadpoles. We hiccup when a nerve spasm causes muscles in the diaphragm, neck and throat to contract. We gasp and take in some air, and the glottis in the back of our throat snaps shut. This tortuous path that nerves take in our body and the brain stem's response when they spasm are marvelous adaptations for gill-breathers, Shubin explains, but not entirely ideal for us.

Shubin's message convinces. Read Your Inner Fish, and you'll never again be able to look a fish in the eye (or eat seafood) without thinking about shared evolution. In two ways, though, Shubin takes a good thing too far. His passion for science enlivens every page, but some of his sentences ("True, big fish tend to eat littler fish") are overly simplified. He could have trusted his readers more.

Even more worrisome is Shubin's tendency to oversell the relatedness of fish and humans. Our common ancestry with apes is far more recent than with fish, and as a result, our inner ape dominates our inner fish. This fact is most evident when we consider behavior as well as anatomy. Do fish empathize with sick companions, grieve for dead ones or express empathy? Certainly not to the extent that apes do. Or consider the wrist joint which, as we have seen, Shubin uses to link Tiktaalik with humans. Enhanced mobility of the ape wrist joint allows chimpanzees and gorillas to gesture in ways more varied and expressive even than monkeys, a capacity that in turn enriches social communication among them.

We humans are first and foremost primates. Nevertheless, Shubin is dead right: The elegance and full emotional power of our connection with the natural world compel us to reach further back in time and deeper into the Earth's fossil layers. Visit Lucy, think Tiktaalik, and feel the connection.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Mike Morgenstein

5.0 out of 5 stars "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

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.