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Your Inner Fish Review	Customer Rating:
Written in an informal, but informative style, "Your Inner Fish" communicates the relationships between living organisms and the coping strategies involved in the adaptation to a changing environment. This book was a joy to read.

Good, but not splendid

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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. Now, 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.

The Story of Fossils and Geneology

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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.

chordate anatomy made bearable, even interesting	Customer Rating:
I am enjoying reading this, 30 years after taking a course covering much of the portion of the book I have so far completed. The authors enthusiasm for the subject and articulate writing style would make this a good read for anyone with out a lot of biology background who wants to have a better understanding of form and function and how it came to be.

Facinating Read!

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Wow! What a smashing blow to the creationist?! Well, I am a creationist but this book gave me many things to consider. So, the the Tiktaalik is a transitional form. I would like to hear a creationist answer to this! Also, The same basic gene can be moved from one creature to another to produce the "hand" - or, the fin in the case of a shark. This book helps to "connect the dots" of how similar all living beings are. It lays it out in such a way that I must say seems like a masterful tapestry of life we have here on earth! You cannot help but be awestruck by the facts as presented here. Very fine piece of work and helped me to put many of the pieces together. Of course, I'm waiting for a creationist answer for some of these items. Well, I'm an old earth creationist and can see no problem with the eons of time. Whatever your persuasion, this book is a real page-turner! NO kidding!