Book Review #3

I finally have had some time to read. And while this is a good thing it turns out that I did not bring near enough books home to read. It is kind of sad that a book that I started months ago I read in 3 days, although I only actually read 2 of those days, and the main reason I got done so fast was that I had to wait for 3 and 1/2 hours for my car to get inspected.

But enough about me lets get to talking about the book. This book is a book I promised would be in my second book review when I wrote my first one (1st one here, 2nd one here) and that I failed miserably at. Yes I finally finished Your Inner Fish by Dr. Neil Shubin. In this book Dr. Shubin uses his discovery of Tiktaalik to describe in very simple terms the evolution of humans from simple single celled organisms to what we are now. In the process he talks about the major skull systems like sight, hearing, and smell and describes how they evolved from our more simple relatives to now. The description on the book reads:

WHY DO WE LOOK THE WAY WE DO? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the "fish with hands," tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and the major parts of our genome look, and function, like those 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.

I really did love this book. It is a very simple read, at least for someone who just took a class in vertebrate paleontology in which a lot of the same topics where discussed, so it doesn't like some one is lecturing too you but at the same time it is not so simple that you feel that someone should be cleaning drool off of your chin. It is clearly written for someone with at least some education that somewhere along the line included some basic biology. He also includes within a couple of quick one-liners that actually had me laughing as I read them. I like the way he treats the subject as well he takes you through his life at the start of each chapter and you can feel him "evolving" as a human and each of his stories in someway tie into the topic of that chapter.

If there was one thing he could have done better is to disguise the book. What do I mean by that? Well the full title of the book is Your Inner Fish, A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-year History of the Human Body. Right away any creationist is not going to pick this book up to read it. And the sad thing is that those are the people who need to read this book the most. He is very clear in how evolution works and would clear up a lot of misconceptions that creationists have about the science involved. So what should he have done? I don't really know the answer to that maybe come up with a name like "How Tiktaalik disproves evolution" and then have "not" written somewhere really small on the cover.

So what do I suggest? I recommend that you read this book it is a very good intro to evolution and if you are a high school or college student interested in evolution at all you should definitely read it. But after you read it you should make sure that your creationist friends read it, I would say go make them buy another copy but then I doubt they would do that since well I have a hard time buying creationist books, they are the ones after all who really do need it.

The author has a website (here) which has a lot of supplementary material for the book, and in fact as I found out from Dr. PZ Myers' blog (Pharyngula found here) today Dr. Shubin and company put out all of the images from the book on PowerPoint slides for teachers to use during their lectures (here). Dr. Shubin they have been downloaded and will be greatly appreciated during my lab teaching in the spring semester but will obviously be referenced to you I thank you.

Book citation
Neil Shubin . Your Inner Fish, a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. 2008. Pantheon Books. New York.

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