Recently, I read Your Inner Fish, a book about the evolutionary origins of mankind, as well as talking about the research that the author directly went through in order to gain more information about how humans came to be through evolution, as well as how surprisingly, we share some similarities with prehistoric fish (as the title implies).

The Book starts with Shubin introducing and explaining his experience with using fossil evidence to determine the origin of mankind, travelling around multiple locations in the world and multiple fossil sites looking for clues. The book also goes over the influence of geography on how they look for fossils, with different rock layers signifying older fossils. The author also talks about different traits we have in similarity to other animals throughout the book. Furthermore, the author also goes over the usage of embryology, or the comparison of the embryos of two different species in order to find similarities to prove common ancestry. In his research, the author found that the human embryo had several similar traits with a shark embryo, implying that we are in some way related to a prehistoric fish. The author also covers the fascinating subject of using DNA to determine changes in an animal throughout the world’s long history, and also talks about the degree of similarity human DNA has to other species, as well as more fundamental theories such as the theory that the mitochondria was once its own independent organism, but later combined with others to form the cell structures we know today.

Overall, I think this book was very interesting, because of the fact that the author was able to make otherwise boring and complex topics interesting by explaining it in a simpler way. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in learning more about topics in biology.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin is available to download for free from Libby.