Just Finished Reading: Your Inner Fish – The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin

It is, of course, difficult for me to resist a book with such an intriguing and playful title. I certainly recognise my inner child (not being very far from him for the last 50+ years) but hadn’t really considered my inner fish (especially as I’ve never been overly fond of water. This book changed all that.

Shubin is one of those scientists (and science writers) who can communicate on several levels simultaneously. His fascinating book is at one level his own story of the search for the ‘missing link’ between fish and amphibians – effectively the first land creature that pointed the way 375 million years later to you and me. One another level it’s the story of how, over many millions of years, creatures such as the Tiktaalik (described wonderfully as the first fish capable of push-ups) slowly and painfully evolved into humanity and what the legacy of those developments are – including hiccups and that annoying problem of choking on our food and drink. On yet another level the book describes the decades long unravelling of the Human Genome and how developments in the research into other terrestrial inhabitants throws a great deal of light on not only how we develop the way we do but, far more importantly, exactly why we and our ancestors have developed the way we and they have.

Not only is this book a delight to read it is also absolutely packed with revelation after revelation about our very intimate relationships to every other living creature on Earth and how those relationships developed over the millennia. It shows how our understanding of human anatomy and physiology can only be enhanced by an understanding of the evolutionary processes that led to them. Without an appreciation of our fishy past some elements of the very things that make us human remain a mystery. With such an appreciation we can look at the structure of the skull, the inner ear or the path of some of the major arteries or nerves and nod sagely because we understand why they look and behave as they do – because millions of years ago they served often very different functions in very different bodies but had been adapted – through the process of Natural Selection – to serve the purposes they now do in our bodies.

If you want to appreciate the explanatory power of Evolution you need look no further than this work. It is an intelligent, compelling and above all enthusiastic discussion of Evolution connecting two apparently very different beings separated by a vast span of time. By continually linking the present with the far past it manages to bring our ancestor to life before our eyes and helps us all to embrace our inner fish and be proud of the fact that 375 million years ago our long dead relatives dragged themselves out of the water and took a breath of terrestrial air – and never looked back.