Your Inner Fish

I read Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish on the advice of a colleague who said it had, among other things, a wonderful description of why you hiccough - and it does!  But it is really much more than that, being a comprehensive, but very readable - account of the physical features and the genetic traits we owe to evolution.  And although he hangs his book on fish, his survey goes much wider than that.

The main idea of the book's title, though, is to follow the formation of the gill arches in fish, and through evolution, to see their effect in humans - the jaw and the ear, with all its delicate complexity.  But, for all evolution's ingenuity, it works with the tools it has - so we can trace genes back to fish and well before, and it is clear that our bodies are still shaped by the developmental origins of a fish's breathing mechanisms.  But this does not mean we are perfect - snoring and hiccoughs are two of the prices we pay for having fish faces, not our own!

This is an interesting read for a lot of reasons - an account of fossil hunting, interesting evolutionary history, and fascinating human biology.  Learn how we smell, how we balance - and why alcohol makes us forget that - and where our ears come from.  And learn some wonderful words - can you really believe (I assure you its true) that the muscle which moves the corner of our mouths down is called the depressor anguli oris, and that which furrows our brow is the corrugator supercilli!

Comments

[glo]

This is the typical stuff one can find only on this blog, and that's one of the reasons why I like so much reading this blog. I always learn something new I didn't expect at all.
I don't need alcohol to make me loose my balance, a dark room is enough for me.