Summary Of Your Inner Fish By Neil Shubin

‘Your Inner Fish’ Scientists have questioned why human bodies are build the way they are for many years now. Fish paleontologist Neil Shubin set out to answer this question in his documentary ‘Your Inner Fish’. Shubin has looked at the bones in human hands and found many similarities with fins in the fish that he studies. This lead him to believe that fish are actually ancient ancestors of human beings. He travels from Chicago, to Pennsylvania, to the Canadian Artic to find answers on the subject. It is in these three sites that he found what he believes to be the answers that he needed to fill in the truth on the connection between humans and fish (Your Inner Fish). Neil Shubin first started to question the connections between fish and

Tabin had been studying chick embryos in order to find out if wings were formed from a signal from a single gene. Years before, in the 1950s, another scientist, John Saunder, had conducted similar experiments on the formation of chicks’ wings. He found that when he tampered with placement of the wing it would continue to grow correctly. Tabin began to study fruit flies and their hedgehog gene, a gene that helped them develop certain structures. He began to conduct the same experiment as Saunder and concluded that a gene, he called the ‘sonic hedgehog gene’, helped the chick create two sets of digits and was present in all other animals, including humans. Shubin pointed out that this gene was important because it was what gave human’s five fingers and five toes, and that just the slightest change in the gene could cause the loss or gain of a digit (Your Inner

It was then that his team finally spotted the snout of a flat headed fish. They dug as much of the fossil as they could out of the rock and took it back to the United States still covered in rock and plaster. When they returned they were able to uncover the true animal beneath the stone. They concluded that the fish, then called the tiktaalik or ‘large fresh water fish’ by the Inuit people, had a neck, wrist, and the bone patterns they were looking for. Shubin had found his ‘missing link’ and the proof he needed to conclude that fish crawled onto land millions of years ago and eventually evolved into humans (Your Inner