Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2815 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-06
• Released on: 2009-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307277459
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
Fish paleontologist Shubin illuminates the subject of evolution with humor and clarity in this compelling look at how the human body evolved into its present state. Parsing the millennia-old genetic history of the human form is a natural project for Shubin, who chairs the department of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and was co-discoverer of Tiktaalik, a 375-million-year-old fossil fish whose flat skull and limbs, and finger, toe, ankle and wrist bones, provide a link between fish and the earliest land-dwelling creatures. Shubin moves smoothly through the anatomical spectrum, finding ancient precursors to human teeth in a 200-million-year-old fossil of the mouse-size part animal, part reptile tritheledont; he also notes cellular similarities between humans and sponges. Other fossils reveal the origins of our senses, from the eye to that wonderful Rube Goldberg contraption the ear. Shubin excels at explaining the science, making each discovery an adventure, whether it's a Pennsylvania roadcut or a stony outcrop beset by polar bears and howling Arctic winds. I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity... nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that ever lived, he writes, and curious readers are likely to agree. Illus. (Jan. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

Customer Reviews

a truly great book!
This is the most enjoyable book I've read on evolution since Gould's fine Wonderful Life. Shubin not only combines great skills in paleontology and anatomy with an insatiable curiosity, but he also has a rare gift at writing as well. The book looks at aspects of human anatomy and senses--hands, smell, hearing, vision, etc--and traces them back--way back! Some of this, of course, has been done before, but Shubin writes with a flair, a clarity, and a precision that brings it all into a new focus. There is also an emphasis on DNA, in particular recent DNA experiments that combined with the paleontology and anatomy makes a very compelling case.

Shubin starts off with the search for a link between fish and land animals that took him to the Canadian Arctic and culminated in the discovery of Tiktaalik--a fish with a flattened head and flippers that made it look rather like a very primitive alligator in ways. The author then shows the evolution of necks and limbs. He does the same with some of the organs such as smell and vision, and shows their evolution as well.

The book is perhaps at its best in its discussion of the role of DNA in evolution. It is now known that it is possible to turn on a gene that is responsible for the development of an eye, for example. So you can create a fruitfly with an eye almost anywhere you want--such as on a leg--and many of these are functional, although in a primitive way. But it gets even more interesting. Suppose you take a gene from a mouse that controls the development of an eye, and implant it into a fruitfly, what happens? You get a fruitfly eye, not a mouse eye. This says a lot about the basic building blocks of life.

The book does have one major flaw. At 200 pages it's way too short! If the writing were dry or stiff, 200 pages would be sufficient, but with Shubin's thoroughly enjoyable writing and choice of subjects, I would have preferred 600 pages.

An excellent book about evolution
Shubin does an excellent job of explaining the link between his two jobs: teaching human anatomy and studying fossil fish. He explains what evolutionary science, i.e. paleontology, comparative anatomy, genetics, embryology and developmental biology have to tell us about the human body, and how it came to be the way it is. Examples include the evolutionary history of limb bones in fossil tetrapods, developmental control genes found in almost all animals today, the evolutionary history of mammalian teeth, the origin of basic "body-plans," genetic comparisons of genes important for our senses of smell and vision, and the history of the mammalian inner ear. He presents some of the evidence each field has to contribute, explains how the findings of the various fields support each other, and relates it all to his own personal research experience. Shubin does this in a way that should be accessible and interesting to most readers. The book is very readable, especially the earlier chapters. Shubin's message is positively pro-evolution rather than attacking Creationism in a negative way.

Embrace Your Inner Fish
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

- Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene II

In "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" author Neil Shubin, a biologist and paleontologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, deftly answers Hamlet's '...what is this quintessence of dust?' query - the short answer is a highly modified fish!

How human 'form and moving,' along with 'noble in reason,' can be inferred from our deep-time ancestors is exciting science, eloquently explored in Shubin's lucid, engaging and accessible prose. Throughout his career Shubin's trendsetting approach split research between anatomical, biological, embryological and paleontological pursuits - all in an effort to understand the evolutionary and developmental mechanisms that transformed proto-limbs into fins, legs, wings, and in 'the paragon of animals,' hands (excuse the anthrochauvinism).

Shubin's innovative approach (integrative biology) was revolutionary in the late 1990s and fundamentally guided the development of evo-devo (evolutionary development), by bucking the trend toward increasing specialization encountered in many scientific disciplines. The insights generated by Shubin's multi-disciplinary approach helped identify which genes changed as lobe-finned fish transitioned into amphibians.

Today Shubin works in a crowded field, but continues to make spectacular discoveries. Peer-reviewed papers routinely depend on hypothesis synthesized from data provided by fossils, genes and embryos. Recently an experiment utilizing embryonic mice switched the mouse Prx1 gene regulatory element with the Prx1 region from a bat - although these species are separated by millions of years of evolution the resulting transgenic mice displayed abnormally long forelimbs.

In 2006 Shubin and his colleagues caught the world's attention with Tiktaalik roseae. This 370 million year old (mid Devonian) 'fishibian' exhibited many tetrapod limb features in its robust fins, including some wrist bones. While Tiktaalik roseae was being exhumed from the frozen artic - at a location predicted by geological, paleontological, and evolutionary theory - fellow researchers back in Chicago uncovered vital clues about the transition from ocean to terra firma by studying the genes that shape the fins of sharks and paddlefish.

"Your Inner Fish" weaves these and other discoveries into a brilliant anatomy lecture. Shubin deconstructs our eyes, ears, noses and hands to demonstrate the common ancestry shared by all extant (or extinct) animals. He also explains how networks of genes that initially express simple traits can expand through mechanisms such as gene duplication and genetic drift, creating networks that can build complex and novel structures such as jaws and heads (in vertebrates) evolved from primordial gill arches.

Quirky evolutionary relics - ranging from hiccups to hernias - are also explored. Thank your 'fish and tadpole past' for hiccups. Men painfully recapitulate the torturous path taken by the testacles during embryonic development whenever they develop a hernia later in life.

Throughout "Your Inner Fish" Shubin articulates how science works. Although creationism and Intelligent Design are refreshingly omitted, this book guts the pretensions and conceits prattled by latter-day lungfish pushing religious agendas in lieu of research and superstition instead of science.

This is a wonderful and insightful book. Highly recommended - excellent companion volumes include Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA (reviewed seperately) by Daniel J. Fairbanks, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald R. Prothero, At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea by Carl Zimmer, and The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past by Matthew Hedman. For a more detailed technical discussion of early tetrapod evolution try Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods by Jennifer A. Clack