The amount of diversity that can come from small changes in initial development of an organism is profound, and Shubin describes this groundbreaking discovery in a manner that is easy to understand by skilfully weaving the realms of paleontology, anatomy and genetics to explain how we humans came to be in our present form.įor someone with or without a particularly strong science background, Shubin made concepts of evolution approachable, interesting, and enjoyable by taking the reader hand-in-hand through groundbreaking discoveries, such as the finding of Tiktaalik or the Tritheledonts that showed that some kinds of reptiles already displayed our mammalian kind of chewing (Shubin, 72). Shubin concludes his book on the point that the pattern of descent with modification is deeply etched inside our bodies, and is matched by the geological record. Shubin additionally asserts that evolution is the cause of all life that exists on earth, while using information on different areas of bodily development such as ears, eyes, teeth, and the head, to prove that the driving forces behind the diversity we have in our world comes from a common ancestor. This examination shows that our basic skeleton and organs emerged over hundreds of millions of years - first in fish, later in amphibians and reptiles, then in mammals. Our development of organs can be tracked with DNA’s set of “toolkit” genes that are remarkably similar whether you are a human, a fly, or a fish.
Our arms and legs, our hands and feet, fit into a larger scheme where our “one bone, two bone, little blobs, then fingers or toes” can also be found in all vertebrates with limbs (Shubin, 2008, 31). One can learn that the genetic recipe that builds our skeletons and organs can be followed in very different creatures. He writes about the points of common origin and ancestry among species, his most significant finding being the discovery of the Tiktaalik Roseae, a 375 million-year-old devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic, which revealed that there is a transitional species between fish and amphibians. His purpose in writing this book is to reveal the evolutionary pathway that has led humans to have the bodies we have today. Evolution, the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth, has been engaged with and thoroughly substantiated in Neil Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body.
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