Neil Shubin, paleontologist, educated at Columbia, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, is Provost of Chicago’s Field Museum and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as an associate dean. This book, which has dozens of drawings and photos, was a national bestseller.

The back cover has a concise summary: “WHY DO WE LOOK THE WAY WE DO? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands” tells the story of our bodies as you’ve never heard it before. 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 genome 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 remarkable enthusiasm.”

The book’s covers show a Tiktaalik (whose nickname is “fishpod”) spread across the front, spine and back of the book. Of the many Tiktaalik web sites, I suggest http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/ and two links therein: “Meet Tiktaalik” and “Your Inner Fish.” In the latter link Neil Shubin has the following additional comments to the above back-cover comments: “Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.”

As the book’s brief Preface says, an extraordinary circumstance, due to faculty departures, led to his teaching the human anatomy course at the medical school of the University of Chicago. He says, “…being a paleontologist is a huge advantage in teaching human anatomy. Why? The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals. The simplest way to teach students the nerves in the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks. The easiest road to their limbs lies in fish. Reptiles are a real help with the structure of the brain. The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are often simpler versions of ours.” The Tiktaalik discovery and his teaching human anatomy led him to a profound connection. The Preface concludes: “That exploration became this book.”

His book focuses on the commonalities in vertebrates of anatomical bone structures and DNA. To me, the many figures made the bone-structure commonalities quite obvious. To put this in words, think of our limbs. Our arms and legs both follow the same pattern that he summarizes as “The common plan for all limbs: one bone, two bones, then little blobs, then fingers and toes.” (“Little blobs” refer to complex bones of wrists or ankles.) A diagram showing this for humans and eight animals is a ‘picture that is worth a thousand words.’ Told in first person, I found his book to be a very exciting and educational read. Here are his 11 chapter titles: Ch 1 is Finding Your Inner Fish; Ch 2 is Getting a Grip; Ch 3 is Handy Genes; Ch 4 is Teeth Everywhere; Ch 5 is Getting Ahead; Ch 6 is The Best-Laid (Body) Plans; Ch 7 is Adventures in Bodybuilding; Ch 8 is Making Scents; Ch 9 is Vision; Ch 10 is Ears.

In Ch 11 – The Meaning of It All – he summarizes all he has shown before: “From Ch 1 through Ch 10, we have shown that deep similarities exist between creatures living today and those long deceased – ancient worms, living sponges, and various kinds of fish. Now, armed with knowledge of the pattern of descent with modification, we can begin to make sense of it all.” There are six levels in the layers of structure: (1) Every animal on the planet shares multicellularity; (2) A subset of (1) has a body plan like ours (with front & back, top & bottom, left & right); (3) a subset of (2) have skulls and backbones; (4) a subset of (3) have hands and feet (vertebrate tetrapods or animals with four limbs); (5) a subset of (4) have a three-bone middle ear (tetrapod mammals); (6) a subset of (5) have a bipedal gait and enormous brains (that’s us people). Neil Shurbin gives a biological “law of everything” as “everything living thing sprang from some parental genetic information. This formulation defines parenthood in a way that gets to the actual biological mechanism of heredity and allows us to apply it to creatures like bacteria that do not reproduce as we do. The extension of this law is where its power comes in. Here it is, in all its beauty: all of us are modified descendents of our parents or parental genetic information.” At the end he discusses how and why “Our humanity comes at a cost” as an unavoidable result of “the tree of life inside us.” This means that “Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component that “comes back to pester us today.” (I omit the examples he gives.)

I found this book by Neil Shubin to be fascinating, very informative, and exceptionally well written. The first-person format made you feel you were there with him as he explained and showed, with many drawings, his arguments about how our evolution proceeded from simple cells to us, guided by his maps of bone structures. I give this book my very highest recommendation. Think six stars!