Books: Neil Shubin's - "Your Inner Fish"

Paleontologist, biologist and pop science writer Neil Shubin famed co-leader of the party that found Tiktaalik

 in 2004 has really written a book I wish I had read sooner "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year-History of the Human Body". Tiktaalik is an extremely interesting and important fossil because it so beautifully fists as an intermediate. Yes, its true all living things are intermediates but Tiktaalik is fun because it happens to be an intermediate between two huge groups of life those with limbs and those without. It seems obvious after reading "Your Inner Fish" that we (and all others with limbs) are descendants from Tiktaalik or a cousin of him.

I couldn't have been happier with this book, it takes some time to get going but is full of fun and useful information about the history of life.

Fun points in the book...

• Among the most mind blowing points of this book in my opinion is that based on the fossil record and an understanding of biology Shubin and his team where able to narrow their search for Tiktaalik to the devonian period and hit pay dirt. We don't see any limbed animals in the pre-devonian fossil record and we see many after this is a huge over simplification of the explanation of Shubin's choice but it gets to the heart of it. It is always exciting a scientific prediction hashes out so well. They expected to find a link between fish and tetrapods here and they did.
• Conodonts are another fun topic discussed in the book. These animals where long known only for (or as) their teeth. For a very long time we didn't know these eel like creatures existed and classified the teeth themselves as conodonts. We now classify them in the phylum Chordata.
• Near the end of the book Shubin helps us understand several common human maladies in the context of evolutionary biology including...
  
  • Obesity
  • Heart disease
  • Hemorrhoids
  • Sleep apnea
  • Hiccups
  • Hernias
  • Mitochondrial diseases
  
  Super fun stuff!

Check out this video a great interview with Shubin given to us by UC Berkeley several stories in this video are taken directly from the book.

A great quote from the video that is not found in the book is at around 44:20.

 "If you look at the Nobel prize in medicine or physiology the last, what 17 years who have they gone to?  Well they have gone to people working on flies, people working on worms, people working on sea urchins, yeasts uhh, sea slugs, corn umm and all these are work on other creatures to provide in sites about human health. So I would like to think as we discover cures or treatments for things that ail us like Alzheimer's, and various types of cancers those treatments and cures will ultimately be derived from work done on flies and worms and yeast and sea urchins can you imagine a more powerful way to state our deep connection to the rest of life then that?"

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