Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor - Softcover

Shubin, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141027584 ISBN 13: 9780141027586

Publisher: Penguin, 2009

Synopsis

Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish is the unexpected story of how one creature's journey out of the water made the human body what it is today - and one man's voyage of discovery in search of our origins.

Have you ever wondered why our bodies look and work and fail the way they do?

One of the world's leading experts in evolutionary history, Neil Shubin reveals the secrets of our biology: why if we want to understand our limbs we should take a close look at Tiktaalik, the first fish capable of doing a push-up; why if we want to know why we hiccup, the answer is in the way fish breathe; and why it is that fish teeth are surprisingly similar to human breasts.

'This would be Darwin's book of the year'
  Sunday Telegraph

'An intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story'
  Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

'Delightful ... his enthusiasm is infectious'
  Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics

'Profoundly fascinating ... a magisterial work ... expressed so clearly and with such good humour'
  Financial Times

'Will make you think about your organs in ways you have never considered before'
  Sunday Times

Neil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently Chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Chicago.

About this title

Review:

'Profoundly fascinating !a magisterial work...if you want to understand the evolutionary history of man and other animals read this' Financial Times 'Stunning case histories!dazzling work ... Shubin's style is light and easygoing' Guardian 'Simple, passionate writing!a twenty-first-century anatomy lesson' Nature 'Fascinating!his conclusions take our history back to scarcely conceivable eras and forms' New Statesman 'A compelling evolutionary story... that unpacks the history of our bones' New Scientist 'An intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human' Oliver Sacks

From the Author:

A Note from Author Neil Shubin

This book grew out of an extraordinary circumstance in my life. On account of faculty departures, I ended up directing the human anatomy course at the University of Chicago medical school. Anatomy is the course during which nervous first-year medical students dissect human cadavers while learning the names and organization of most of the organs, holes, nerves, and vessels in the body. This is their grand entrance to the world of medicine, a formative experience on their path to becoming physicians. At first glance, you couldn't have imagined a worse candidate for the job of training the next generation of doctors: I'm a fish paleontologist.

It turns out that being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest roadmap to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are simpler versions of ours.

During the summer of my second year leading the course, working in the Arctic, my colleagues and I discovered fossil fish that gave us powerful new insights into the invasion of land by fish over 375 million years ago. That discovery and my foray into teaching human anatomy led me to a profound connection. That connection became this book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141027584
• ISBN 13: 9780141027586
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256