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Loading... Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human…by Neil Shubin
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1   dchaikin | Oct 11, 2009 |  Neil Shubin was involved with the discovery of Tiktaalik, a very important fossil. In this book he describes that discovery, and also describes which parts of our bodies are evolved from which other parts in ancient animals. It is very understandably written and gives a great introduction into human evolution. (  ) divinenanny | Sep 17, 2009 | A book well written with a lot of information. A passionate description of the relationships between us (our body) and all the life that came before us (fish, worms, flies, ..). I wish "intelligent design" believers spend more time reading good books like this instead of wasting their time studying legends from the bronze age (aka bible). (  ) folini | Aug 12, 2009 | Neil Shubin manages to take a potentially dry subject and transform it into a very accessible and enjoyable account of man's evolution from simple cells. For such a vast and academic subject, there is nary a dry flat moment. His success is that there is enough detail to engage, yet the ideas and discoveries are simply put and clearly explained and really quite fascinating. Read this if you are interested in evolution and the connections between living things. If you would be fascinated by the fact that human male tendency to develop hernia is because he evolved from the shark whose testes were up at the forward part of its body, or perhaps that two of our middle ear bones are derived from the jawbones of fish, then this book is for you. It would be good present for a budding medical student ready to tackle anatomy. It is a good book to fill the gaps in knowledge that biologists have discovered in the last twenty years. It certainly puts our relative importance firmly in our miniscule evolutionary place amongst the millions of billions of years of creatures that preceding us. I was impressed with this fascinating read. ( )5 kiwidoc | Aug 9, 2009 | The book talks about our fishy origins and shows how life on Earth is interrelated. This book is intended for the kind of people who are interested in the evolution process, as well as science in general. ( ) Alina100 | Jul 31, 2009 | 
 Shubin's engaging book reveals our fishy origins (for which we can thank hiccupping and hernias) and shows how life on Earth is profoundly interrelated. A book after Darwin's heart.  Shubin connects with sections on his own work discovering fossils, and on the sometimes surprising roots of modern human complaints. But the paleontologist can't escape his own academic history — much of Your Inner Fish reads like a cross between fleshed-out lecture notes and a dummed-down textbook.  Your Inner Fish combines Shubin's and others' discoveries to present a twenty-first-century anatomy lesson. The simple, passionate writing may turn more than a few high-school students into aspiring biologists.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375424474, Hardcover)Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks's unusual and fascinating case histories of "differently brained" people and phenomena--a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a community of people born totally colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few--have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the patient as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007's Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University. Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book--an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human. The field of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin's research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish--and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin's groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the unearthing of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary "missing link" between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers. My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible without a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on earth. Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank. (Photo © Elena Seibert) A Note from Author Neil Shubin This book grew out of an extraordinary circumstance in my life. On account of faculty departures, I ended up directing the human anatomy course at the University of Chicago medical school. Anatomy is the course during which nervous first-year medical students dissect human cadavers while learning the names and organization of most of the organs, holes, nerves, and vessels in the body. This is their grand entrance to the world of medicine, a formative experience on their path to becoming physicians. At first glance, you couldn't have imagined a worse candidate for the job of training the next generation of doctors: I'm a fish paleontologist. It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest roadmap to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are simpler versions of ours. During the summer of my second year leading the course, working in the Arctic, my colleagues and I discovered fossil fish that gave us powerful new insights into the invasion of land by fish over 375 million years ago. That discovery and my foray into teaching human anatomy led me to a profound connection. That connection became this book. Click on thumbnails for larger images    The crew removing the first Tiktaalik in 2004 Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin propecting for new sites (Credit: Andrew Gillis) The valley where Tiktaalik was discovered (credit: Ted Daeschler, Academy of Natural Sciences)   The models of Tiktaalik being constructed for exhibition (Tyler Keillor, University of Chicago) Me with one of the models (John Weinstein, Field Museum) (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:23 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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As this subtitle tells us, this is a look at why we humans are constructed the way we are from an evolutionary perspective. So we learn that the nerves which control our facial expressions follow crazy whirling paths through our heads, and also connect to our ears — and Shubin tells us why. Or he gives us an evolutionary explanation of why we lose our balance when we get drunk. (Our inner ears developed form little organs fish use to detect water movement. And the fluid they developed happens to mix poorly with alcohol.) In general he points out that we are kind of like a souped-up Volkswagen Beetle — we are a more primitive life form that has been awkwardly modified for each new evolutionary challenge — and that is the source of practically all our health problems.
Shubin spends the book tracing many of these modifications back as far down the evolutionary tree as he can get, and quite a few go all the way to the single-cell animals. It's a good story.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the book are his asides about his personal experience searching for fossils in the field. In one story he describes being a grad student and looking so carefully at an outcrop and failing to find a single fossil — while the rest of the group were filling bags with fossils. His problem was that he had to learn to tune his eyes to recognize the right kinds of patterns and textures. This was something I can relate to. I remember a day as grad student looking so carefully at a Kansas roadside outcrop, and seeing just a simple flat limestone bed of certain vague characteristics. After a while our professor walked up and starting pointing out various features right in front of us — fossil root trails, discolored surfaces, textural changes. I had looked right at them without seeing them. These are fossil soil features on a marine rock unit. Suddenly I was able to get new a sense of the ocean rising and falling; an entire dynamic environment began to come alive. (