Book Review: Your Inner Fish
You know the joke about the lawyers and the sharks? Well, after reading Your Inner Fish, you will have to modify the punch line to “we are all sharks”.
Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Pantheon (January 15, 2008), 240 pp. (Amazon, Audible)
Labeling Your Inner Fish as simply a popular science book would do injustice to the content and the author, Neil Shubin. The book is more of a scientific biography, and also the evolutionary biography of our human anatomy. Passionately, Shubin describes his first steps into paleontology and evolutionary biology, and how excruciatingly uneventful research can be, till the finding of Tiktalik, a legged fishlike ancestor, turns all the exasperation into excitement. He shows, with an uncanny realism, that scientists are not just boring old guys in lab coats, but are actual people who seek their thrills in revealing the truth of our natural world, and our place in that world. By detailing the quests undertaken by scientists to finally get their results, Shubin gives us not only the facts but also the way in which we reach the conclusions, which gives credence to the excitement and plasticity of scientific endeavour. Neil Shubin’s message would only fall on deaf ears for those who deny evidence for reality.
Chapter by chapter, the book delves deeper into the origins of our body plan, including the little and big ills we suffer because of the evolution behind our anatomy. Those annoying hick-ups? You should thank your fish-like ancestor for those. In fact, the entire blueprint of our Homo sapiens sapiens body can be traced back to common ancestors in one form or another. Our bodies are haphazardly jerry-rigged biological machineries and by studying our biological past we are able to piece together how this all came to be. Shubin details this principle with convincing skill, and leaves the reader with the message that we all have an inner fish.
The book is very enjoyable and receives 3½ stars out of 5. However, this rating is given by someone with a solid biological background; for laymen this book is definitely worth a higher rating of 4 stars.