In Your Inner Fish, Shubin looks at different parts of the human body, for example teeth, and hands and arms, eyes and ears, then traces their structures back through the scientific record to see where each bit first appeared. Plunging into the DNA of each holds many answers. Human embryos look a lot less different from embryos of other species than we as adults look from the fuller versions of other critters. Looking at how embryos develop one can see remarkable similarities among species. This was front page news across the world in 2004. Currently both a professor at the University of Chicago and Provost of the Field Museum, his primary claim to fame was as the person who located in the Canadian Arctic, a fossil, Tiktaalik roseae, a flat-headed fish/amphibian that marked the transition of animals from sea to land. Paleontology, like Con Edison, swears by the motto “Dig we Must.” Shubin offers a quick intro into how one decides where one should dig to increase the odds of finding what you are looking for. There is a wealth of fascinating material in this easy-to-read book on how human anatomy came to be.
Neil Shubin with Tiktaalik or the other way around - image from the Chicago Tribune Neil Shubin follows both paths on his road to our past in a book that demonstrates popular science writing at its best. One can look at fossils to see how we got from there, waaaay back there, to here, and one can also find, in comparing embryos of different species, evidence of our developmental history. How are embryos like fossils? How did we come to have the hands, arms, heads, bone structures, ears, eyes and many of the other parts we have? It turns out that homo sap is a very jury-rigged critter, an accumulation of biological compromises and re-purposed parts.
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