Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin

Jan 2008 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).

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 major parts of our genomes 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.

Ratings and reviews

Learned lots and lots of stuff from this book. It answers some of the questions that you always ask but never bother to look up because you think the answer either doesn't exist or is way to complicated. An example would be how do cells stick together or how do cells in the pinky know to form a pinky and cells in the thumb know to form a thumb. It also gives some really really cool insights into how we literally are pretty much just modified fish. For example, it shows how a fish jaw bone became part of the human ear. At some points the language can become confusing, so you may need to reread parts of it, but overall, I loved this book!

I started to read the sample and it said "none of us was here" instead of "none of us were here". More distractions followed. I didn't want to read his theories if I didn't find his writing skills top notch.

We look the way we do because we were created this way. Do some real research & you will see the Bible is completely in line with science. That includes the lie that the Bible says the earth is flat. It clearly says the earth is round & floats freely in space.

About the author

Neil Shubin is the author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish, which was chosen by the National Academy of Sciences as the best book of the year in 2009. Trained at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley, Shubin is associate dean of biological sciences at the University of Chicago. In 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.