Review - Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
July 11th, 2008 John Posted in Books, Reviews |
Part science book and part career memoir, Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” takes an amiable journey through the evidence for evolution and what it really means to us now.
Shubin, a paleontologist and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, met renown upon the discovery of Tiktaalik, a landmark example of a transitional species. In this case, it was a creature that existed as an intermediate between fish and land mammals. As Shubin and his colleagues studied their finding, they found that so many parts of the Tiktaalik were traceable directly to the structure of the modern human. It looked like a crocodile, but it was us.
His book is also a look back to his own professional experience, unveiling what it takes to be the sort of person to scuttle around digging up fossils. With good humor, Shubin relates the planning required of his job, as well as the grunt work involved and the strange world a paleontologist enters when the wide world takes note of one of his discoveries.
Most importantly, Shubin traces the way science uncovers our past, the interconnectedness of the disciplines that do so and the specimens they study. To deny evolution is to deny all of science, since the entire umbrella is used to collate the data that proves evolution is a process that all life goes through. As Shubin’s book well-documents, there is a little bit of the same thing in every creature on earth — it’s how scientists are able to do anything.
In doing all this, Shubin walks a remarkable line — demystifying the process and the people who do the research, presenting them as human beings that any of us could know, while still giving the scientific data with the depth it deserves, not dumbing down the presentation in order to make us feel less threatened by its lofty perch.
To link it all together, Shubin evokes a biological “law of everything” that stipulates that every living thing has parents — and that lineage is a chain of simplicity by which we are all linked. It’s an eloquent and amusing journey through the biological family tree of Earth.
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