Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body
By Neil Shubin
A book review by Robert Hodges Neil Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body is a book about the author’s discovery of what many call a transitional organism between fish and amphibians: the Tiktaalik roseae. Tiktaalik was discovered in the Canadian Artic in 2004 by Shubin and his team. The discovery is believed to be a pivotal point in history when the very first fish ventured out onto land. Shubin tells the story of evolution by tracing the origins of the human body back millions of years. Shubin writes that our hands resemble fish fins; our head is organized like that of an extinct jawless fish, and parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. He walks the reader through the evolution history of our wrists, teeth, jaws, head, eyes, ears, and our sense of smell. He explains these similarities from top to bottom not only in words, but with convincing illustrations. While reading this book, I found it interesting how Shubin explained that fish and mammals have some similar genes which in fish turn into fins and in mammals turn into limbs. Also of interest was how certain species and even genders are predisposed to certain problems due to evolutionary changes. Neil Shubin is a gifted writer and uses humor and enthusiasm for his work to engage the reader. This book is informative and thought provoking as is correlates the relationships and similarities between all living things and the Earth we call