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

Neil Shubin is a mixture of a paleontologist and some kind of a DNA researcher, which gives him a unique take as a professor of human anatomy. He brings these all together in an enjoyable and very accessible form here.

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.) show more 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.

2009
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If, like me, you haven't picked up a biology textbook in the last 20 years, I'm afraid your biological knowledge is completely out of date. In an effort to learn more about the world around me, I've been making an effort to learn about the latest findings. Sean Carroll's books have been enormously helpful, but they are still a bit on the technical side. Neal Shubin's book, Your Inner Fish, covers much the same ground, but in a more accessible and understandable way for the general reader. The findings are absolutely remarkable. The same genes, the same body plans, the same proteins, jury-rigged over eons of time can produce remarkable diversity.

My only complaint is the title of this book. It put me off reading it for a long time. It's show more too cute and suggests a superficial approach to the topic. Happily, such is not the case. While much of the technical detail is smoothed over, the essence of the new understand provided by molecular and developmental biology is explained in clear and interesting prose that makes the general ideas extraordinarily compelling. It is interesting to me that we have come so far in biology that you can have a paleontologist and and a molecular biologist working side by side in the same lab and not think it is the least bit strange. show less

A very readable account of the evolutionary history of the human body. IMO, the title sells the book short because it’s not strictly fish-focused in explaining how and why we share similar traits with other creatures. Also, it’s not just history. The author is a paleontologist and takes us along with him to the digs where some of the discoveries about these evolutionary links were made. I enjoy reading books by science journalists but they never convey the level of enthusiasm that comes from a book written by someone who has made the science itself their life’s work, such as this does. Easily 5 stars.

YOUR INNER FISH reminds me of Richard Dawkins' THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, the reading of which gave me truly new insight into the workings of physical evolution. Even though I devoured Dawkins' work some time ago, I can say the same for Shubin's book. Shubin, however, does not delve as deeply into his subject as Dawkins nor present as many details, hence the subject I've used for this review. Also, while Dawkins' book may challenge the conceptual skills of a college graduate, Shubin's is, I feel, as appropriate for young adults of, say, high school level reading ability, as it is for older adults.

Both authors are far, far more readable and capable of sustaining a reader's interest than the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was. I show more would greatly prefer to reread both YOUR INNER FISH and THE ANCESTOR'S TALE than to plow through the dry facts in Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES again.

While I believe it is fairly accurate to observe that Dawkins explains the process and the proof of physical evolution partly in terms of molecular structure and function, Shubin does so primarily by demonstrating that more or less every part of the human anatomy has its counterpart in creatures of far simpler structure with origins that predated the earliest modern humans by millions of years. It is fascinating to see how primitive physical structures changed in location, form and function over the 500 million or so years that animals with body structures have existed on the earth. Not all of these are particularly intuitive, either; for example, I'd have never guessed that the tiny bones in my middle ear originated as gill arches in fish!

Paleontology finds a prominent place in Shubin's book. The importance of the fossil record to our understanding of evolution is well illustrated by the discovery of Tiktaalik, a fossil fish with the rudiments of modern wrist bones in its fins. Shubin does not stop with his successful comparisons of modern humans and ancient fish, however. If we proceed farther into the realm of rudimentary life forms, we see the equivalence of the notochord in worms with our own spinal column. Without belaboring the fact or using biological names for organisms, Shubin also demonstrates the principle behind taxonomy and the grouping of life forms into kingdoms, families, genus, species and other such categories.

Among my favorite “pet peeves” is the almost universal human practice of speciesism, the faith-based belief that humans are superior to and hold natural dominance over other animals. (Early Christians even wrote this belief into their bible.) If there is one thing that should cause such believers in human supremacy to reconsider their assumption, it is the fact that every structure in their bodies has evolved from equivalent structures in the bodies of other animals and that even the structure of their individual cells can be seen in the simplest unicellular microbes. Without the mitochondria in their bodies' cells to convert sugar and oxygen into energy, they'd cease to live, yet those mitochondria once were free-living microbes! If our bodies hurt or sicken, the malady is in many cases traceable to the fact that our bodily structures began in aquatic environments and have yet to adapt perfectly to bipedalism. Shubin's book is not only instructive but, more importantly, is also humbling. It adroitly shows humans' place in the much larger animal kingdom and helps us see that we are only a point on a continuum of constantly evolving life forms.

I heartily recommend YOUR INNER FISH to every reader from teen years through adulthood who wishes to understand humanity's place as a life form among many such life forms on the earth and how we came to be where we are. I do wish the book were longer, for the final sections dealing with evolution-related illnesses are all too brief, but if Shubin's book awakens one's curiosity. Dawkins' THE ANCESTOR'S TALE would be an excellent follow-on. show less

From the tiny bones in our mammalian ears to the arrangement of individual bones in each of our limbs, Neil Shubin lays out a fascinating picture of the many ways in which our modern human bodies are abounding with remnants of a more "fishy" body and lifestyle. Many features are obvious when studying a skeleton, several more become apparent when described and illustrated, and still others, such as predictive gene behavior, come to light only with experimentation. This book had many aha! moments, and spoke forcefully to my inner paleontologist, which had me half questioning my less scientific career choices. Marvelous.

This is a lovely book, clearly and concisely informative. Whenever I was thinking I need a diagram for this, there it was. It's not only your inner fish, it's your inner ancestry back to microbes, but the author is a paleontologist who (along with others) discovered Tiktaalik, a link between water and land animals. I've read a few evo-devo books, so some of this book was familiar, but the scope is broader and the style a focus on essentials without clutter. How do you know where to look for fossils? How and when did the water dweller's fin pattern of bones become the land dweller's leg pattern of bones? How do paleontology, embryology, and genetics show different aspects of the same evolutionary story? How are teeth, feathers, hair, and show more glands similar, and what does this tell us about their evolutionary history? What is a body, how is ours similar to a sea anemone's, how and why might such a thing have emerged? How do smell, vision, and hearing work, and how have the mechanics been refined over time? This is broad schematic structure rather than deep detail, but exactly the sort of thing I need to make sense of the detail.

(read 28 Feb 2009) show less

I understand that this book has spawned a fairly popular BBC production, which I should probably check out. I picked the book up because I was looking for answers to lingering questions I’ve had about evolution, and was pleased to find not only the answers I was looking for, but answers to a lot of questions I probably should have been asking. A serviceable analogy is to imagine Shubin as a magician revealing his trade secrets. Before I read this, the idea of nature having separately created so many specialized adaptations seemed almost incomprehensible. Then Shubin reveals the “behind the curtain” manipulations of natural selection and change over time, and suddenly these outcomes seem not just explicable, but even just a little show more obvious. I expect this is how Watson felt every time Sherlock Holmes revealed the logical process that lay behind his seemingly “miraculous” deductions. Evolutionary science is by no means “elementary,” but in Shubin’s hands it is revealed to be both logical and credible.

Essentially, the book traces the ancient antecedents of our human anatomy back to their evolutionary beginnings. Some of our traits are relatively newly acquired – our sense of smell, for instance. But the basic genes that establish our body shape – that distinguish “head” from “tail”, and “left” from “right”, for instance – are ancient indeed, originating from genes that have been around since the first jellyfish populated primordial oceans.

The book tackles our basic body systems one at a time, using evidence from paleontology, embryology and genetics to painstakingly track the evolution of each body part from its origins to its modern day form/function. For instance, the author tracks how bones that used to form part of reptilian skulls in time came to be repurposed as mammalian earbones; how nerves that used to enable fish to use their throats to both breathe and eat gradually came to control the muscles that pump our heart (inefficiencies in this “jury rigged system” are to blame for hiccups, by the way); and how the genes that used to produce gills in fish have been repurposed by evolutionary pressures to create the features of our human faces.

Though the first few chapters were on the dry side, I eventually began warming to the topic and by the end was reading enthusiastically. This experience, however, inclines me to be cautious about recommending Inner Fish to others. In spite of the author’s herculean efforts to make the content entertaining and accessible, folks looking for a light scientific read or who have forgotten most of what they learned in 9th grade biology may find parts of this a tough slog. If, however, you find yourself (like me) wondering how the millions of specialized creatures inhabiting the earth today can possibly have evolved from clumps of primodial ooze, then I think you’ll find this book both fascinating and informative. show less