Summary Of Your Inner Fish By Neil Shubin

Your Inner Fish

In the book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, Dr. Shubin, a 55-year old paleontologist, explains how every living organism can somehow be drawn back to a common ancestor, and that we are all theoretically related. Shubin explains in depth about the “Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body,” and how we are all intertwined and connected back to the very first living organisms. Dr. Shubin bases a lot of the book on things he has found while looking for fossils, and things he had studied while in college, naming many different scientists and how they helped him to put together facts and puzzle pieces to write this book. You find that Doctor Shubin always relates his topics back to his personal story of expeditions

He states how it takes paleontologists like himself forever to find fossils since you have to know the right place to look. We also see that Shubin starts to explain the hierarchy of all living things with the example of going to a zoo. He starts with stating, “Every species in the zoo and the aquarium has a head and two eyes. Call these species ‘Everything's.’ A subset of the creatures with a head and two eyes have limbs… ‘Everythings with limbs.’ A subset of these headed and limbed creatures has a huge brain, walks on two feet, and speaks. That subset is us, humans.” (Shubin 7) In a diagram that is placed in the book, you can see that he has created one more category between “Everythings with heads and limbs,” and humans. So, the hierarchy goes, “Everything with heads,” shown as a fish, “Everything with heads and limbs,” shown as a geico, “Everything with heads, limbs, hair, and breasts,” shown as a wolf, and “Everything with heads, limbs, hair, and breasts that walks on two legs,” shown as a human. Just this chart alone shows that we are already connected to fish, showing that we both have heads. Later in the book, Shubin goes even further to show us how we are evolved from the first living organisms on

Shubin explains that how our eyes work is along the lines of this; our eyes filter in light through a very advanced filter. The light then travels to a lense that acts like a camera, and focuses on the objects that we need to see. Without the advanced set of eyes that we have, we would see things as fuzzy round circles instead. We see in chapter ten a big part of evolution and how we are related to other animals. The main part of our ear in which we see evolution is the Middle Ear and the three ear bones. The three ear bones of the middle ear are in only a few animals, and the way that they are present in humans in much different from other animals. The three ear bones are the malleus, the incus, and the stapes. The malleus and the incus formed from the transition of reptile to mammal, and in the reptile, they originally made up jawbones, as years went on, they formed into a bone in the ear for humans. The stapes formed from the transition of fish to amphibian to human, and in the fish, the stapes was the hyomandibula, a large rod that connects the upper jaw the brain case. The stapes, through evolution, formed into an ear bone. All of these elements together show the clear and undeniable facts of evolution, ranging from jawbones and ear bones, to better formed