Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body | Neil Shubin | Making fossils rock!

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Your Inner Fish: A...

	Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body Neil Shubin Pantheon, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 83 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Evolution for the Nonscientist

I was required to read this book for a class I was taking but oddly enough I found it to be thoroughly enjoyable. Shubin guides the reader through his career and his discoveries and how they came to shape his knowledge and impressions of evolution.

The way that Shubin presents his knowledge to the reader is very organic. He flows from one point to another as he builds upon his evidence and shoes you the conclusions that can be made from it. The best part of the book is the fact that while Shubin is presenting some heavily scientific ideas he does it in a way that is easily accessible to the lay person.

Overall I found this book to be very effective and I would recommend to any person who wishes to educate themselves about evolution.

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Making fossils rock!

Upon reading the preceding, uniformly glowing reviews, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe they were written by friends of the author - this is a book by a fish paleontologist, after all. But even after a few pages, I could understand the enthusiasm. This is a gem of a book. It popularizes science in the best possible sense: making the arcane not only accessible but meaningful to those without specialized knowledge. Its central message is that we all contain within our genes and anatomy a legacy of the entire course of the evolution of life. The author conveys his own sense of wonder at this realization in the conclusion, but until then allows us to gradually experience it ourselves as he brilliantly summarizes the amazing analogies in structure and development between ourselves and even the most seemingly primitive life forms. Without ever sounding a strident note, he demonstrates with overwhelming evidence not only the nature, but inherent elegance and beauty of evolution. With its concise chapters and breezy prose (including the occasional pun inserted with geeky delight: a dental vestige is an "inconvenient tooth"), this small volume magnifies the impact of its message by being a pleasure to read.

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Wonderful tour through evolution

If you want to find out how you are similar to a jellyfish, read this book! Its view of human embryonic development and our relationship to other species is lucid and fascinating. The author is a paleontologist and anatomy professor who can really write. This is a great read for anyone from teenagers to octagenarians.

Engaging non-specialist treatment

This was a page-turner, only very occasionally clunky in style. This book made me realize how spotty and out-of-date my training in biology is. It also left me wanting more, which has got to be a good sign for a science book meant for the general public. So now I'm on a hunt for more books on paleontology, embryology, evolution, and DNA

When I was quite young, they showed us an animated documentary in school called something like "Hemo the Magnificent," about the evolution of multi-celled creatures in seawater and the preservation of many aspects of seawater in the bloodstreams of land animals. While most of my public elementary school education is a blur, that documentary stuck with me; I still can remember whole sections of it. This book, aimed at adults instead of children, struck me in the same way.

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