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

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

Editorial Review

Details on a Major New Discovery included in a New Afterword
Why do we look the way we do? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the "fish with hands," tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest--enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible enthusiasm.

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.

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
• Book Club surprise--one of the best in my non-fiction list for 2008
  As assigned reading for a book club, Your Inner Fish became for me a page-turning, fascinating read with enough described real-life excitement to generate my own mind-expeditions through the Arctic, voyages to the cliffs of Nova Scotia, and tedious hours in labs carefully excavating fragile fossil from ancient rock. I felt a little like an armchair Indiana Jones. The expedition leader is Professor Neil Shubin, who reads like a humble storyteller sitting around the fire after a hard day negotiating barren... more info
• Excellent introduction to paleontolgy and evolution.
  This book was a wonderful introduction to the subjects of evolution and paleontology. Shubin writes this book in a highly readable and exciting manner. One might expect books on these subjects to be somewhat staid, yet Shubing makes them very exciting. You will learn just how to closely related all life forms really are. While humans' relationship to other primates is now obvious, you will see how some of our body parts are simply performing other functions in other species, and how this explains why, for... more info
• A truly remarkable book
  This is a genuinely remarkable book. The author combines his expertise in paleontology and anatomy with his true gift for clear, stylish writing to produce the best book about the evolution of humans that you're likely to find. The book traces all of our major "subsystems"-- hearing, vision, skeletal form, internal organs, skin, etc.-- back as far as possible, sometimes to the single-celled creatures who appeared at the beginning of life on earth. At the same time, he describes the latest research into DNA,... more info
• Our Evolutionary Branch, Demystified
  Neil Shubin, an evolutionary biologist who works as Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, clearly chose the right career. In Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Shubin traces the history of our anatomy with a passion that leaps off the page. His conversational writing style, coupled with animated anecdotes and crisp descriptions, energized my reading so that two hundred pages seemed more like twenty.
  The title of the book, Your Inner... more info

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