Your Inner Fish Your Inner Fish

Your Inner Fish

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

    • 4.2 • 115 Ratings
    • $8.99
    • $8.99

Publisher Description

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.

GENRE
Science & Nature
RELEASED
2008
January 15
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
240
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
4.4
MB

Customer Reviews

socalbp ,

I'm Smarter!

Fascinating read. Slightly disappointed it wasn't longer.

CinderPunch ,

A Persuasive Book That Enjoys Belittling Its Own Points

"Your Inner Fish" is an attempt by a researcher to communicate a discovery and its importance to a wider audience disguised as a journey to find the history of the human body. Some of its points are very interesting, but most of them are over-simplified or unimpactful. I was assigned this book to read before an AP Biology course, and was given positive review by its teacher on this book, so I was excited to get in to the book. Unfortunately, when I actually started reading, I couldn't stand how two simple sentences took two pages for the author to explain, when the meaning should have been common sense. The semi-advanced concepts in the book are hidden behind elementary-level names that become ridiculous to identify as a scientific theory. The path to find the history of the human body should be an interesting concept, but when Neil Shubin writes it, it becomes an over-complicated process of trying to find out why some thoughts are even relevant to the topic, and trying to stay awake during its incredibly algorithmic anecdotal experiments.

Psnyder ,

Excellent account of an extraordinary story

Shubin tells the story of how Darwin's theory of evolution allowed him to predict the most likely place to find the fossil of a fish that is the common ancestor of every 4 limbed animal that lives on land... and some that managed to find their way back to the sea. Discovered less than 250 miles from the north pole, and after years of searching, Shubin and his team found Tiktaalik. This book describes the path to discovery and the amazing revelations that this fossil has taught us about how all land animals evolved from this creature, 370 million years ago.

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Die Geschichte des Lebens Die Geschichte des Lebens
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