Your inner fish
by Neil Shubin · first published 2008
80% recommend20% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Accessible account of human body evolution traced through fish ancestry, drawing on fossils such as Tiktaalik; readers praise it as a well-explained introduction for anyone curious about how body parts evolved.
Summarised by Claude from recommending 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.Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, lo
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…Delusion" by Richard Dawkings "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens "End of Faith" by Sam Harris But books by Steven Hawking "The Grand Design", "Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss and "Your Inner Fish - A Journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body" by Neil Shubin, are also great although somewhat more technical. All other books are softer read.
on “"Sometimes science must give way to religion"” ↗…http://www.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0143... [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Show-Earth-Evolution/dp/1... [4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Ancestors-Tale-Pilgrimage-Evolutio... http://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Ye... http://www.amazon.com/Endless-Forms-Most-Beautiful-Science/d... http://www.amazon.com/Making-Fittest-Ultimate-Forensic-Evolu...
on “Misconceptions about Evolution” ↗Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin Dust by Joseph Amato The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Most collections by Stephen Jay Gould (though I like "I Have Landed")
on “Steven Weinberg: Science books for the general reader” ↗I'm guessing you mean excluding textbooks The Extended Phenotype Your Inner Fish Thinking Fast and Slow The Information Chaos Statistics in Plain English Fortune's Formula Fooled by Randomness A Random Walk Down Wall St. How to Win Friends and Influence People
on “Ask HN: Books with a high signal to noise ratio?” ↗There's a great detailed explanation of this and many other evolutionary processes such as the eyes, in the book "Your Inner Fish" https://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Y...
on “Scales, Feathers and Hair Have a Common Ancestor” ↗…Barry K. B. Berkovitz, Nothing But the Tooth: A Dental Odyssey (Elsevier, 2016) John A. Long, The Rise of Fishes. 500 Million Years of Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage, 2009) T. M. Smith, The Tales Teeth Tell: Development, Evolution, and Behaviour (MIT Press, 2018) Peter S. Ungar, Teeth: A Very…
on “Surprisingly little evidence for usual wisdom about teeth” ↗Neil Shubin's Your inner fish (a pretty cool book, I might add) discusses this briefly in the introduction. From memory, it's a question of combining geological knowledge with knowledge of what you want to find. Basically, you're…
on “3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia” ↗I strongly suggest reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" which explains a bit more on how different bits etc evolved if you're interested in the topic.
on “A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans” ↗If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding where to look for Tiktaalik. Basically, you start with whatever thing you want to find out…
on “A Treasure Trove of Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life” ↗…* Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer by Jo Marchant (William Heinemann) * The drunkard's walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin) * Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin)
on “2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books” ↗…Perennial) * Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer by Jo Marchant (William Heinemann) * The drunkard's walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin) * Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin)
on “2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books” ↗