Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Book Review: The Story of Fossils and Geneology
Summary: 4 Stars
Through extensive fossil records and geneology, Mr. Shubin takes the reader through the development of single celled organisms (bacteria), multi-cell (jellyfish), bodies (worms), skull (fish), hands and feet (reptiles), three-boned middle ear (mammals), and finally, bipedal with large brain (humans).
We have in us anatomical design improvements that can take us only so far from our water borne ancestors. Mr. Shubin asserts if humans were designed from scratch, "we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer."
If, like me, you have always wondered why the male scrotum tucks close to the body in chilling weather, "Your Inner Fish" is an excellent source.
Curiously, Mr. Shubin made no mention of how a Cro-Magnon was able to win the U.S. presidency twice; in 2000 and 2004.
Book Review: Good but not splendid
Summary: 4 Stars
Neil Shubin, codiscoverer of the Tiktaalit, shows in this book that to become a human you must first become a fish. Its a wonderful argument against the notion of `intelligent design'. Or would you call a car manufacturer intelligent who makes a Mercedes by first building a wooden coach? Nevertheless there is an unwholesome streak of creationism and anti-darwinism in Shubins otherwise lucid descriptions, a streak which seems to belong to US-American culture like Samba belongs to Brazil. For example, he criticizes Haeckels `ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' understanding of the way evolution shows up in embryos when Haeckel "would compare a human embryo to an adult fish". But any changes in the features of an embryo - like going from fish to human - require the action of natural selection to have acted once - and not on an embryo. Natural selection operates on the reproduction success of an animal, and that means adults. Therefore, for any developmental stage of an embryo, there must have existed an adult creature that had evolved just to this stage; and when you trace the embryonic development, a fossil must exist at every level that had achieved just this stage. To understand the embyro, you need to understand Natural selection, which means you must understand the reproduction success of the adult. It does not suffice to compare the embryos of different species - their "blueprints" ; Shubin just loves to talk all the time about "blueprints", which is a typical design term. Tracing embryos runs parallel to tracing the fossils of adults.
For another example, look at the way he describes the recent research situation when it was found that "in many single-celled animals, much of the molecular machinery for cell adhesion, interaction, and so on is just not there", which "would seem to support the notion that the genes that help cells unite to make bodies arose together with the origin of bodies. And at first glance, it seems to make sense that the tools to build bodies should arise in lockstep with the bodies themselves." This idea makes sense, yes - if you are a creationist. If you think like Haeckel, this is nonsense because for selection to produce bodies there must have been a single cell animal with all the needed machinery existing. And as Shubin beautifully narrates, just such an animal turned up : the choanoflagellates.
Science has been kind to Haeckel, contrary to what Shubin asserts in the book.
Despite my reservations, I highly recommend his book because of Shubins genuine enthusiasm for his subject, and the wealth of new results that he presents. If it had more of Dawkins and much less Gould in it, it would have been splendid. The pictures are as miserable as I have come to expect nowadays in good books about science.
Book Review: Lightweight but worthwhile
Summary: 4 Stars
Whilst always very readable, there's something just a little unsatisfying about Neil Shubin's exploration of the evolution of the body up to the one currently occupied by homo sapiens. I think ultimately because it comes over as a little too lightweight, even though the subject is overwhelmingly big.
Nevertheless, there is no denying, ultimately, the level of fascination in the material.
It is, of course, not always comforting to find that, once analysed, human beings are based on the same blueprint as any other animal with a head (and anus, as it happens - Shubin seems to take delight in repeating the word) and some without, where mouth and anus (there it is again!) combine, as in the sea anemone.
Through words and pictures the author demonstrates the similarities between your nearest and dearest and sharks, salamanders, flies and all sorts of other creatures you normally wouldn't be inviting to a family reunion. There's an inevitable quantity of technical vocabulary, but it's never in torrents so it never overwhelms.
So whilst a trifle unsatisfactory as heavyweight Natural History, the book has more than enough going for it to recommend it to the general reader.
Post Script
Some way through the book I will admit to reflecting on first its potential as a treatise on evolution, but then second on the potential it holds for the Intelligent Design lobby - basic blueprint, materials reuse, continuous development.
Shubin doesn't tackle this, which is a shame; I'm reminded of the misuse of Nietzsche under different circumstances and wonder at the naïveté of it all. The ID myth is, of course, nothing more than that, but why give it a potential scientific credence?
A brief check confirms that Shubin is in the evolutionary camp, but that does not dispel some of the ambiguity of Inner Fish, with mentions of the Creator (his capital), no small amount of teleology (suggesting on a number of occasions that species determined for themselves in what direction to develop), and the suggestion that a basic "design" "arose" rather than that a pattern evolved - incredibly there is not much mention of the word "evolution".
In a period during which the forces of reaction are trying their best to roll back the gains of evolutionary science in dispelling superstition, it seems irresponsible to provide them with an open goal.
Book Review: Tiktataalikin good
Summary: 4 Stars
Decent enough book by one of the co-discoverers of the famous fossil, Tiktaalik, which tells a little of the story of it's discovery and why it was such an important find. However, interesting though it is, this book isn't solely about Tiktaalik. Rather, the author uses it as a jumping off point to examine various features and quirks of the human body and how they can be explained from our knowledge of embryology, paleontology and genetics as consequences of our ancient ancestry.
It's a well written book by an author who clearly enoys what he does and is an entertaining and informative read. Possibly a little bit lightweight for the money as others have commented - but then as I borrowed it from my local library, there are no complaints from me on that score!
Book Review: Truly Wonderful
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the best science reads in a very long time - if you want to know the lay of the land in modern evolutionary science, this is about as good as it gets.