Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin is a great scientific read for those interested in evolution. It highlights the path of our evolutionary ancestors, right back to spineless worms called Amphioxus and even sea anemones. For someone who finds it fairly difficult to get excited about evolution, even though I do find it interesting, this book was the perfect starting block. I have studied evolution every year for the past 5 years and a lot of the content has been a repeat so my lack of enthusiasm is understandable. However, when I started reading this book, I found his writing captivating and felt his excitement through his words. He talks with such passion and clarity that it is almost impossible to not get excited with him. In the beginning he talks about his field of work and how he got to be where he is today. He takes the reader through how he plans his expeditions and what exactly to look for, learning these skills from the many role models he was privileged enough to meet and work with.
In chapter one, Shubin dives straight in to talk about
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Many experiments were done which proved this and soon they discovered this same gene in every limbed organism. Researchers experimented with injecting a mouse’s Sonic hedgehog into a shark embryo, expecting the vast difference between the two species to get in the way but surprisingly the gene had the same effect on the shark, indicating how similar their genetic makeup is.
Chapter four explains the importance of teeth in evolutionary research because they preserve so well as well as contain vast amounts of information about the species. Before teeth were sought after, scientists discovered creature with bony heads called Ostracoderms. The chapter goes on to explain how the development of teeth comes from the interaction of proteins in the skin and the production of