Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

Reviewed by Gerti

With a title like “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body”, how could I refuse to read this book? I had previously read some biographies of Charles Darwin, so I knew about his theories of evolution that presume ape-like creatures are among human ancestors. But never had I thought that human ancestry could go back as far as fish, and even further. Yet Shubin lays his nearly indisputable evidence out here in his book in language which even a non-scientist like myself can understand, and it is mind-blowing.

What really sold his message, however far-fetched it sounds, was Shubin’s steady, deliberate march back in time, each chapter taking a step further, eventually showing how all our 5 senses - vision, hearing, etc. – find their origins in sharks and other aquatic ancestors. Even more shocking – how creatures we don’t think of as having a front and back side, like jellyfish, are in fact oriented the same was we are, you just can’t tell by looking at them. This book is full of more surprises than a 5-pound box of chocolates!

“Your Inner Fish” is full of strange and unusual facts that if you are anything like me, you won’t know about either. I loved those facts and could follow along pretty easily for the most part. One of the few flaws in the book for me are the drawings which are meant to illustrate Shubin’s point, but were often just confusing lines with an unclear message. Perhaps I need to have studied more embryology when I went to nursing school, but his illustration of arches and cranial nerves, meant to make his concepts clearer, just muddied the waters for me, and that was kind of frustrating.

Still, you want to know if this book is worth reading, right? God, yes! It’s probably even worth purchasing for the home library, although I’ve got to think that if Darwin read it back when he was first postulating an evolutionary link between humans and animals, he would have thrown it against the wall as so much nonsense. Yet Shubin takes his theories and extrapolates as far back as he can go – and he does it clearly and with stress-relieving humor - which in the end makes reading this book a universe-expanding experience. Much more than the recent film “Jurassic World”, this book will make you ponder the mysteries inside every strand of your DNA and your every microbe. Shubin makes the facts believable, even if every brain cell fights against the knowledge that we are indisputably related in some way to every other living thing on earth, from barracuda to bonobo. “Your Inner Fish” is a highly recommended if somewhat challenging read.