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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Thursday, September 08, 2016


Just Finished Reading: The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being – Evolution and the Making of Us by Alice Roberts (FP: 2014)

Well, I hardly know where to start unpacking this fascinating tour through the human body. Its 356 pages are dense with information so much so that you have to slow down so as not to be overwhelmed by it all. The route she follows is equally interesting – moving literally from head to toe, starting with the basic questions like ‘Why do we have a head?’ and uncovering how the fertilised egg slowly becomes you!

Each section brings with it its own questions and the answers supplied call on embryology, anatomy, anthropology, primate studies and palaeontology. We learn about the development of the nervous system, the evolution of eyes, where your ear bones come from, how our fish ancestors are responsible for some very quirky plumbing (the author can’t stop herself having a dig at creationists from time to time when she points out just how badly ‘designed’ our bodies are), how we ‘mirror’ others in our own heads in order to model their behaviours and make predictions of what people are going to do next, how children learn by watching as much as by trying and doing, why our eyes are at the front (with neat stereoscopic vision) rather than at the sides of our heads, the history of our speech box and why men have deep voices (I disagreed with her on this one and though she overlooked something quite basic), human segmentation – along with practically every other complex creature on Earth, why we have so many back problems, chest cavities, shoulder blades and upright walking, the big headed birth problem and the spirit of compromise, why we have four limbs, not six (or more or, indeed, less), why feet are so important especially the big toe, standing on our own two feet (habitually) and the ability to outrun horses, arm movement and the ability to throw accurately, and how we are linked to all other life.

As a first book introducing you to the wonders of human biology I doubt if much could beat this. You could spend days combing it for information, cross referencing with other areas of science and moving deeper from there – always returning to this work for your next biological assignment. It is, indeed, an excellent overview of where we are in the study of ourselves (and how such a study has changed over the last 100 or so years – especially since the discovery of DNA. If you’re new to the subject or haven’t picked up a biology or evolution book since school, but wondered what else had been discovered since your teens, or maybe you want to help your kids with their homework and need a quick refresher course this is definitely the book for you. Much more on this fascinating subject(s) to come. Highly recommended.  

Coming Next: The Black Panthers.

2 comments:

Stephen said...

Sounds meaty -- strange I've not seen this one.

(By the way: someone just produced a book on our internal germosphere and used "I Contain Multitudes" as the title. I totally called it in "10% Human". :-D)

CyberKitten said...

I think you'd like it. There's a lot of this sort of thing out there. Alice Roberts has a wonderful 'voice' in this book as she does on her (many) TV appearances.