Shubin: Your Inner Fish

From Scienticity

Scienticity:
Readability:
Hermeneutics:
Charisma:
Recommendation:
Ratings are described on the Book-note ratings page.

Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish : A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. New York : Pantheon Books, 2008. 20 pages : illustrated, with maps; includes bibliographical references and index.

And inner worm, fly, mouse, etc. Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, is an excellent little book about evolution. Shubin is an anatomist and paleontologist whose team discovered a "missing link" fish that walked. He traces various organs, systems and anatomical oddities from their origins in fish, sponges, worms, etc., to how they function (or in some cases dysfunction) in humans. He intersperses the evolution bits with stories of fossil hunting, lab research, and planning expeditions.

The best things about this book are the drawings and diagrams. To follow the bones of the arm from lizards, dinosaurs, through birds, seals and humans is great. To see how the structure of the eye has developed (including what the creature with each eye could see) is wonderful. I don't see how anyone could read this book and still feel that there were no transitional fossils because so much of this is about the transitional creatures.

A little of the history of DNA and gene sequencing gets a little confusing so that is why readability only gets a 3; otherwise this book is very good.

-- Notes by MKI