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 Lightweight but worthwhile October 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Whilst always very readable, there's something just a little unsatisfying about Neil Shubin's exploration of the evolution of the body up to the one currently occupied by homo sapiens. I think ultimately because it comes over as a little too lightweight, even though the subject is overwhelmingly big.
Nevertheless, there is no denying, ultimately, the level of fascination in the material.
It is, of course, not always comforting to find that, once analysed, human beings are based on the same blueprint as any other animal with a head (and anus, as it happens - Shubin seems to take delight in repeating the word) and some without, where mouth and anus (there it is again!) combine, as in the sea anemone.
Through words and pictures the author demonstrates the similarities between your nearest and dearest and sharks, salamanders, flies and all sorts of other creatures you normally wouldn't be inviting to a family reunion. There's an inevitable quantity of technical vocabulary, but it's never in torrents so it never overwhelms.
So whilst a trifle unsatisfactory as heavyweight Natural History, the book has more than enough going for it to recommend it to the general reader.
Post Script
Some way through the book I will admit to reflecting on first its potential as a treatise on evolution, but then second on the potential it holds for the Intelligent Design lobby - basic blueprint, materials reuse, continuous development.
Shubin doesn't tackle this, which is a shame; I'm reminded of the misuse of Nietzsche under different circumstances and wonder at the naïveté of it all. The ID myth is, of course, nothing more than that, but why give it a potential scientific credence?
A brief check confirms that Shubin is in the evolutionary camp, but that does not dispel some of the ambiguity of Inner Fish, with mentions of the Creator (his capital), no small amount of teleology (suggesting on a number of occasions that species determined for themselves in what direction to develop), and the suggestion that a basic "design" "arose" rather than that a pattern evolved - incredibly there is not much mention of the word "evolution".
In a period during which the forces of reaction are trying their best to roll back the gains of evolutionary science in dispelling superstition, it seems irresponsible to provide them with an open goal.
Good but not splendid August 28, 2008
Neil Shubin, codiscoverer of the Tiktaalit, shows in this book that to become a human you must first become a fish. Its a wonderful argument against the notion of `intelligent design'. Or would you call a car manufacturer intelligent who makes a Mercedes by first building a wooden coach? Nevertheless there is an unwholesome streak of creationism and anti-darwinism in Shubins otherwise lucid descriptions, a streak which seems to belong to US-American culture like Samba belongs to Brazil. For example, he criticizes Haeckels `ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' understanding of the way evolution shows up in embryos when Haeckel "would compare a human embryo to an adult fish". But any changes in the features of an embryo - like going from fish to human - require the action of natural selection to have acted once - and not on an embryo. Natural selection operates on the reproduction success of an animal, and that means adults. Therefore, for any developmental stage of an embryo, there must have existed an adult creature that had evolved just to this stage; and when you trace the embryonic development, a fossil must exist at every level that had achieved just this stage. To understand the embyro, you need to understand Natural selection, which means you must understand the reproduction success of the adult. It does not suffice to compare the embryos of different species - their "blueprints" ; Shubin just loves to talk all the time about "blueprints", which is a typical design term. Tracing embryos runs parallel to tracing the fossils of adults.
For another example, look at the way he describes the recent research situation when it was found that "in many single-celled animals, much of the molecular machinery for cell adhesion, interaction, and so on is just not there", which "would seem to support the notion that the genes that help cells unite to make bodies arose together with the origin of bodies. And at first glance, it seems to make sense that the tools to build bodies should arise in lockstep with the bodies themselves." This idea makes sense, yes - if you are a creationist. If you think like Haeckel, this is nonsense because for selection to produce bodies there must have been a single cell animal with all the needed machinery existing. And as Shubin beautifully narrates, just such an animal turned up : the choanoflagellates.
Science has been kind to Haeckel, contrary to what Shubin asserts in the book.
Despite my reservations, I highly recommend his book because of Shubins genuine enthusiasm for his subject, and the wealth of new results that he presents. If it had more of Dawkins and much less Gould in it, it would have been splendid. The pictures are as miserable as I have come to expect nowadays in good books about science.
The Story of Fossils and Geneology August 26, 2008
Through extensive fossil records and geneology, Mr. Shubin takes the reader through the development of single celled organisms (bacteria), multi-cell (jellyfish), bodies (worms), skull (fish), hands and feet (reptiles), three-boned middle ear (mammals), and finally, bipedal with large brain (humans).
We have in us anatomical design improvements that can take us only so far from our water borne ancestors. Mr. Shubin asserts if humans were designed from scratch, "we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer."
If, like me, you have always wondered why the male scrotum tucks close to the body in chilling weather, "Your Inner Fish" is an excellent source.
Curiously, Mr. Shubin made no mention of how a Cro-Magnon was able to win the U.S. presidency twice; in 2000 and 2004.
 And a marvellous fish it is August 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Neil Shubin has an extraordinary gift for making science that can be difficult to sift through highly interesting. Drawing on his own and other's discoveries many of the more difficult areas of human development are covered with a truly admirable passion. Throughout the book Shubin's passion literally leaps of the page making the book an enjoyable one-sitting read
Shubin's Majestic Trek into the Human Body, Billions of Years in the Making August 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Your Inner Fish" truly merits ample praise for being one of the best-written books on science I've read in years. It also ranks easily as an early, leading candidate as one of the finest books published this year. In clear, concise, and quite vivid, prose, this marvelous terse tome recounts in spectacular fashion, the incredible saga of the evolutionary history of our human body. Vertebrate paleobiologist and anatomy professor Neil Shubin is our enthusiastic, expert guide through this amazing journey into our body's primordial past, weaving with utmost brevity, a most compelling, and intricate, tale from fossils, genes and developmental biology. A fascinating trek through these aspects of evolutionary biology that represents too an intriguing personal scientific odyssey from a novice graduate student to a seasoned scientific veteran of major field expeditions in search of rare, often unique, vertebrate fossils across the globe and of substantial laboratory work in evolutionary developmental biology. In short, in terse, exquisite, well-written, prose, Shubin demonstrates the deep evolutionary connections that unite humanity not only with other mammals, but with other vertebrates too, and indeed, as well, with a veritable tree of life.
Most of Shubin's succinct chapters are devoted to the evolutionary history of both the human body plan and its major organs, such as the eyes and teeth. The opening chapters briefly explain man's kinship with other vertebrates, and recount the unexpected discovery by Shubin and his team of Tiktaalik, the earliest known transitional fossil between fish and tetrapods (land-dwelling vertebrates, including us). These are followed by an extremely short, quite lucid, introduction to the relevance of genetics in evolutionary developmental biology research (Chapter Three), in which Shubin clearly traces the evolution of limbs from fins to bird wings, and finally, human hands. Succeeding chapters include those devoted to the evolutionary history of teeth (Chapter Four), eyes (Chapter Nine) and ears (Chapter Ten). However, the two most intriguing chapters are those devoted to the development of the vertebrate body plan (Chapter Six) - drawing upon both classical embryology and modern molecular biology and genetics, emphasizing the importance of Hox genes - and the evolutionary developmental history of multicellular animals (Chapter 7), culminating in a terse discussion of the Precambrian Ediacaran fauna. Shubin concludes this fascinating little volume with an intriguing discussion (Chapter 11) of human ailments ranging from hiccups to hernias and obesity, demonstrating how these have their origins in our distant evolutionary past, as far back as four hundred million years ago. Without a doubt, "Your Inner Fish" will delight not only students - and others - interested in evolutionary biology, but also those seeking a deeper understanding of both human anatomy and medicine from the perspective of evolutionary biology.
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