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

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What a pity there is no Nobel for palaeontology. Some sort of award should be given to Neil Shubin for finding "Tiktaalik" in the Canadian Arctic. It wasn't a chance find - he relates the detailed planning steps leading to its discovery. An extra ribbon should grace the medal for explaining that fossil's significance in this book. There have been recent accounts on the evolutionary path of animals emerging from the sea to take up the role of landlubber. Carl Zimmer's "At The Water's Edge" and Jenny Clack's "Gaining Ground" are examples. Both preceded the "Tiktaalik" find, but more to the point here is that while both are excellent writers, Shubin demonstrates communicative skills bordering on the superb. This is truly a book for everybody. Especially if you want to know why you develop hiccups.

A great fuss was made over the "Tiktaalik" discovery. What is its significance? For starters, it was flat-headed ["So what? I know lots of people who are flat . . ."]. While we may consider flat heads in derogatory terms, for life emerging from the sea, it was a vital step. That the head could move independent of the rest of the body was even more significant. Fish cannot do this, and except for bottom dwellers, don't have flat heads. Further, "Tiktaalik's" eye structure gave it forward vision. In a creature 375 million years old, these characteristics are significant. They offer clues to how you and I are put together and why. Shubin offers a meaningful example of this when he showed "Tiktaalik" to his daughter's preschool class and they declared it to be both fish and reptile - which is the key to the value of his work here.

Land dwelling, Shubin reminds us, requires major changes in body plan. Instead of fins propelling the body through the water, limbs capable of supporting that body must develop. Those limbs must have flexible contact points, leading to the formation of fingers from fin bones. Lifting the body reformed the bones' arrangement leading to our wrist and hand structures. Air breathing shifts the location of oxygen-capturing equipment and distribution. Predation techniques change, which might render some bones superfluous. The author's description of how the former jaw bones of fish relocated over time to become the delicate transmitters of sound in our inner ears. Making sound turns out to be derived from other fish. The ancestors of sharks left a string of arches as part of our bodybuilding mechanisms. One of those arches nestles in your throat as the hyoid bone, essential in making speech. Another of those arches evolved into the diaphragm separating our lungs from other internal organs. Hiccuping, Shubin says, "has its roots in fish and tadpoles" because the pattern set in our brain that controls breathing has been "jury-rigged" in the steps to becoming human. In fish, the distance from the brain to the gills is short, but in mammals, the convoluted path those nerves take allows for signal disruptions - hence, hiccups.

Shubin spends much time explaining the development of embryo studies. Watching the progress of a fertilised egg in becoming a finished organism gave researchers insight in how to look for signs of how today's life is assembled. In Freshman Biology, we are still told of "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" - the idea that a human embryo goes through fish, reptile and mammal stages during development. Karl von Baer had already discovered this was incorrect, but it took modern genetic analysis to overturn Ernst Haekel's enduring axiom. Embryos, von Baer observed, form in triple layers, and depending on the signals from the genome, enable one of the layers to begin dominating to produce the appropriate body plan. Shubin uses these studies to further explain the rise in understanding leading to the appropriate HOX genes triggering the chosen layer. As he notes, his work area is braced by two seemingly irrelevant facilities - a fossil preparation facility at one side, and a genetics laboratory at the other. This book brings the two disciplines together with seamless effectiveness. Graced with some photographs, but many fine line drawings to enhance the text, the book is a prize addition to everybody's library. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This book is a fascinating view on the evolutionary legacy of the human body. How much we (and other related animals) owe our current body design to ancestors in the past. Evolution works by modifying what already exists, so one can usually trace the evolutionary history of species by tracing their body plans. Animals that share similar body plans tend to be related to each other. That doesn't mean similar forms (that's convergent evolution), it means they're built out of the same materials, using the same methods. The latter point is quite important, as that relates to DNA, giving us a second method for examining evolutionary history- compare the DNA of the organisms, with an eye towards the building genes.

Overall, this is a fascinating book and a good example of solid science. I enjoyed reading the book, and found that it was suited to academics and general audiences. Shubin has done a very good job in making a fossil fish from the arctic turn into a fascinating story that's well worth the read. If you ever want to give a skeptic evidence on human origins and the evolution of species, this book also does that very nicely. Well done Dr. Shubin.

Shubin's Your Inner Fish covers a lot of ground. As the title suggests, a good part of the book discusses the similarities between living creatures: in some ways, Shubin explains, we are very like fish. Of course, we are separated by fish by some hundreds of millions of years, which leaves a lot to discuss. The final chapter includes a brief but interesting discussion of how understanding our own evolutionary history can help us understand how and why we get sick. Those few pages left me wanting more. In addition to hard science, Shubin also includes some personal history, including the hunt for the fossil known as Tiktaalik, one of the first fish to make the transition to land.

This book reminds me, in some respects, of Richard Dawkins' excellent book, The Ancestor's Tale (but perhaps only because I have not read that much paleontology). Both books explain the evolution of the fascinating ancient creatures that are our great, great . . . great grandparents.

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 creatures is an excellent preparation for understanding of how the human body works.

The book is a fascinating and insightful journey into the 3.5 billion years of evolution. It combines scientific facts and information with personal stories and anecdotes. The scientific information is fresh and relevant, and it is not just a regurgitation of the material that can be found in a myriad other books on evolution. These facts really help you with gaining insight into how exactly all life on Earth is related.

The last major chapter is probably the most interesting. It is an examination of the way that many of our chronic diseases and illnesses can be traced to the very restricted design options that evolution had. There really is a price that we pay for getting to where we are in the evolutionary development.

This is a great book, it meanders a little but if I were looking for something to give to a biology student as a gift, or to help ease interested and intelligent readers into the world of science writing, this one would be on the shortest list. Wonderful quick look over several related fields that leaves all sorts of tantalizing hints of other areas to explore. This guy must be a fantastic professor to learn from, he writes lucidly and without a hint of condescension, about a subject he is obviously passionate for and learned in. I loved it, just wish it were longer and had a more comprehensive bibliography or source guide. Can't wait to see what else he writes in the future, definitely an emerging voice in a crowded field.

I'm not in the field, nor am I a deep academic. I'm just getting into this theme of reading and I found this book extremely fascinating! The author's descriptions and explanations were easy to understand and I kept wanting to read more. He's got a great down to earth nature and approach.

I have learned a lot and this book has made me wanting to hunt down more books on this topic. Big thanks to the author and all the work he has done!

Shubin is that rare scientist, who is good both in his discipline and an entertaining writer. He often reminds me of the late Stephen J. Gould in that regard. I can only hope that he continues to write. He brilliantly interweaves our genetic connection with other species in ways that make sense even to the non-biologist. Of course, the star of the show is the transitional fish-to-amphibian his team found in 2004 on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic. I hope that that is a story that finds its way into the classrooms of Canada. Someone should send this book to our Minister of Science and Technology, who neither understands nor accepts evolution, and will be sending much valued research biologists out of the country.

The previous crticism by Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) does an excellent job of outlining the subject of the book and I won't attempt to improve upon it. Rather, I'll just add my two cents as to the style and 'enjoyability' of the work...

First, let me say that Mr Shubin has a very pleasant and readable style of writing. He presents his theses in a way that is graspable by the non-scientist and non-confrontational, as compared by recent works that discuss evolution and religious belief together.

Ultimately, however, this is a book that will only entertain persons who are not religious fundamentalists and who already have a fairly decent appreciation of the fundamentals (no pun intended) of the evolutionary process. There are lots of books, of recent publication, that have weighed into the rationalism vs. irrationalism, science vs.religion controversies but this is not one of them.... Look to this book for an interesting addition to biological knowledge rather than a philisophical treatise concerning the origin of life.

C. John Thompson