Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… as I was approaching college age as the 80’s were dawning on us, I had three areas of interest that I explored for my future life’s work. Each would set the course of my adult life in three very different ways and each would have been a different University.
I was interested in forestry, which would have taken me to Northern Arizona University, paleontology, which would have started at my home town university, the University of Arizona, or computer science at Arizona State University.
Forestry was the long shot and got eliminated early, and plays no further part in this story.
My deep and abiding interest was paleontology – I wanted to be a fossil hunter, but my aptitude was more computer science.
Computers won because as I learned more about the coursework required for paleontology, I realized that there were large parts (like biology and zoology) of it that would really be painfully dull for me.
Looking back, I didn’t make the wrong choice. Paleontology has developed significantly since the days of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Parallel developments in other fields, such as genetics and evolutionary biology have dovetailed with the old bone diggers and brought us to a quantum leap in our understanding of past life. (Yuck, I apologize for that sentence. Must be too much sugar in my iced tea.)
That’s my long way of saying, I love a good book on the evolution of life, especially when there’s a paleontological adventure involved.
Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish (and Shubin himself, for that matter) first came to my attention when he plugged the book on the Colbert Report. Colbert, in his role as a conservative fundamentalist host, always throws his guests a few curve balls (or googlies, if you prefer a cricket analogy over baseball) and I was really impressed at how well Shubin comported himself on the show.
That alone made me want to give him money by reading his book, but Shubin has another important claim to fame: He was an instrumental part of the team of paleontologists who discovered Tiktaalik, the important fish to amphibian transitional fossil.
The book’s subtitle is “A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body” and, as such, isn’t strictly about Tiktaalik, or even fossil-hunting. It is an excellent, and easily accessible book that gives a good primer into how genetics and fossils tell us why life is the way it is.
As such, I’d recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in understanding “how it all comes together.”
Your Inner FishA Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
by Neil Shubin
Pantheon BooksISBN 978-0-375-42447-2
