Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Where to buy Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body books online?
- ISBN13: 9780307277459
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Details on a Major New Discovery included in a New Afterword
Why do we look the way we do? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-learned Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells the tale of our bodies as you’ve never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands really resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like persons of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible enthusiasm.Amazon.com Review
Oliver Sacks on Your Inner Fish
Since the 1970 publication of Migraine, neurologist Oliver Sacks’s unusual and fascinating case histories of “differently brained” people and phenomena–a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome, a community of people born really colorblind, musical hallucinations, to name a few–have been marked by extraordinary compassion and humanity, focusing on the uncomplaining as much as the condition. His books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film), and 2007’s Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.
Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book–an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure tale, one which will change forever how you know what it means to be human.
The meadow of evolutionary biology is just beginning an exciting new age of discovery, and Neil Shubin’s research expeditions around the world have redefined the way we now look at the origins of mammals, frogs, crocodiles, tetrapods, and sarcopterygian fish–and thus the way we look at the descent of humankind. One of Shubin’s groundbreaking discoveries, only a year and a half ago, was the finding of a fish with elbows and a neck, a long-sought evolutionary “missing link” between creatures of the sea and land-dwellers.
My own mother was a surgeon and a comparative anatomist, and she drummed it into me, and into all of her students, that our own anatomy is unintelligible lacking a knowledge of its evolutionary origins and precursors. The human body becomes infinitely fascinating with such knowledge, which Shubin provides here with grace and clarity. Your Inner Fish shows us how, like the fish with elbows, we carry the whole history of evolution within our own bodies, and how the human genome links us with the rest of life on planet.
Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a fantastic read; it inscription the debut of a science writer of the first rank.
(Photo © Elena Seibert)
A Note from Leader Neil Shubin
This book grew out of an extraordinary circumstance in my life. On account of faculty departures, I finished 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 influential experience on their path to apt 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 additional animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The simplest 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, effective in the Arctic, my colleagues and I learned 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 tie. That tie became this book.
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This could have been a fascinatingly informative book if it stuck to the finding of the fossil itself and its unique mosaic of features, like the present-day platypus and its mosaic of features. What kills this book’s getting a better rating is that it is yet one more Nova/Nat’l Geographic type sermon praising the theory of evolution. “This means that and thus it is so” mentality that so many evolutionists pummel us with ruins the best impact of fossil data in letting it speak for itself. Tiktaalik roseae doesn’t scream evolution nor does it dance the transitional fossil hype shuffle. It just is one heck of a unique critter that lived a LONNNNNGGGGGGG time ago before man walked the planet. Because it is a mosaic lifeform of features evolutionist went looking for with a paradigm in tow doesn’t make it what they say it appears to be. In the final analysis — it is a weird critter and no more. What Tiktaalik roseae certainly “gave rise to” was yet another evolutionist “pleased dance” and no more. Wow! What a glorious diversity of life this planet has held & still offers! (researcher at Duke University)
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
What a waste. Ok, if you know NOTHING about evolution or palentology, then this book might be acceptable but, otherwise, its a terrible bore. I got half way through and, finding nothing really new or appealing, I couldn’t justify finishing. Let me summarize the book for you and save you some money: people evolved from fish and thus there are similarities between us and fish. There you go. Save your money.
Not recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I’m very pleased with our order. The book arrived in mint condition. The shipping was a small slow, but it was worth the wait. Thank you. A fantastic deal and a fantastic buy.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Light on science and heavy on anecdotal narrative. I didn’t need to read about finding the fossil and was much more interested in the theory. If you’re looking for a ‘toilet book’, or a book that isn’t too thought-provoking; this might be the book for you. I imagine he got a book deal because the discovery was so profound, but doubt that it was because he had a fantastic tale to tell.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The physical condition of this book is fantastic. It is a excellent looking, well sized hardcover with clear and simple-on-the-eyes print, and the pages themselves have a nice feel and look to them, all in all a fantastic book.
As to what is written within you merely need to look at the additional reviews.
Highly recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5