Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Well I finally finished this one, and I have to say I was still loving it to the very last word. Living in a nation that, more often than not, has seemed to turn its back on the sciences and any semblance of progress it’s quite the breath of fresh air to read a best-selling popular science text. Your Inner fish presents human evolution from fish to man in vivid, exciting, and down right alluring detail. This book really gets to the heart of what makes us so wonderfully, or sometimes woefully, complex. In fact in the course of reading this book I found out the convoluted reasons behind several medical issues in my own personal history.

Even those of us who have been dragged into the “evolution debate” by some horribly and willfully ignorant individual sometimes forget that, by its very nature, evolution doesn’t have a recent beginning. Man does not “come from apes” man is an ape, and before that he was a tree-dwelling mammal, and ground dwelling mammal, a proto-mammal, an amphibian, a walking fish, and a fish. One in three men has a hernia of some sort at some point in his life because his testes start their development in the same place as a fish, namely his chest. I didn’t even know that, developmentally, the testes did develop near the chest before reading this book.

Like any good science text it has a Bibliography and suggested reading portion, and thankfully it is well annotated and sorted by chapter, meaning this book can be your gateway into a better understanding of any of the topics presented. I’d also add that the “Vintage” edition I purchased included an additional afterward not present in earlier printings in which the author discusses some interesting new discoveries about Tiktaalik, a fossil intermediate which serves as a large part of the text in the first few chapters.

I have been a bit hectic with starting a new Gym ritual, and the ongoing job hunt, as well as my new dice fetish, so I haven’t made much progress with any of the other books I’ve been working my way through, but in true book addict style I’ve still managed to accumulate piles more. Yay me…

I am working on a new module for Labyrinth Lord based on Faerie Magic, or to be more precise Renaissance magic, gone awry. Nerdy I know, but such I am, and to quoth Popeye, “I yam what I yam.” No details until I’m sure something is going to happen with it.

Tagged with: Evolution | Fish | Human | Human BOdy | Your Inner Fish

Categorised as: BookLog | Reviews