Neil Shubin Your Inner Fish Analysis

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Your Inner Fish-Neil Shubin Erika Raskind 4/7/11 A Hour The Unraveling of How We Evolved Expeditions are often frustrating in the life of paleontology, though when one man discovers something so great which reveals one of the biggest asked questions about human evolution as well as life on Earth, it seems to all be worth it to teach everybody about your discovery . Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin unravels the great mystery that ties the human body to the bodies of our prehistoric ancestors. Neil Shubin, who is a paleontologist and professor of anatomy, uncovers the missing link to how the organs of our bodies evolve over millions of years. He discovers species that we share comparisons with by performing…show more content…
One important discovery Shubin made is Tiktaalik, which is a 375 million year old fossil. Tiktaalik is a fish that has scales and gills, but its head is flattened like that of a crocodile. Like most fish, Tiktaalik’s fins have ray bones enabling them to paddle in water, but the most amazing thing about it is that it has interior bones which allows it to lift off of the sea floor, something unordinary for a typical fish. It would use its limbs for support like a tetrapod. Shubin shows how fin structures of fish like Tiktaalik mark the beginning of the evolution into the mammalian paw and opposable thumb structures in the hands of today’s primates. The significance behind Tiktaalik is how it proved to be the missing link which greatly shows the transition from fish who swim, to four-legged vertebrates. Neil also states that all creatures in the world are built similarly to one another. Creatures such as whales, birds, and humans have single arm bones that each lead to two others, that connect to fingers or our toes. In us humans, this shows up in the humorous, and they go through the radius and ulna into our wrist bones and fingers. Another discovery is that our teeth…show more content…
This hardening of the teeth would allow them to bite into other animals. Teeth are key to survival, because without food one would die, so the idea behind having teeth is to eat other animals. Shubin also stated the idea that embryos look very similar during development of an organism, no matter how different the limbs developing may be. It was found that a gene known as the Hox gene determines the basic structure and orientation in any given organism, which in the end is how embryos can appear similar. Other features Shubin said evolved are the abilities of sight, smelling, and hearing. Just like today, we use different opsins to see in color than we do in black in white. Colored vision was not something found in any animal, until the gene in a mammal from millions of years ago duplicated and the copies specialized for different light sources instead of just black and white. Neil’s believes colored vision is in relation with the plants of the earth, and how it may have enabled creatures such as monkey’s tell the difference between types of fruits and leaves. All in all, Your Inner Fish was not my favorite book due to its dryness,

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