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

This really was a pleasure - another book recommended by Wendy - although what I liked most about it was possibly not the most obvious things about the book. From very early on I was in a bit of a world of my own and had started to wonder what to make of the fact that palaeontologists tend to make such wonderful science writers?

I've said it before, but I think Gould is a better writer than Dawkins - and that is a big statement for me, as I tend to prefer an English voice over an American one. I don't mean that to be rude, but there are many more similarities between British English and Australian English than I think there are with American English - but Gould is in a class of his own. I get Gould, I understand him much more readily than I understand other 'science writers' and I think this is because I really understand his notions of development and change. His book, Life's Grandeur (or Full House - in the States) is perhaps one of the greatest books on evolution ever written - as someone who had read many, many books on evolution before I had read Life's Grandeur I really didn't think I would ever 'fundamentally' learn anything new about evolution again - this book showed me just how limited my understanding of evolution really was. The only other book to come close to 'teaching me anew' something I thought I knew well enough was Deep Time. Although Your Inner Fish didn't fundamentally change my view on the world - I think it might if you haven't read much on evolutionary biology. Even if you have, there is much of interest here.

But I've distracted myself - the thing that had me fascinated throughout this book was the idea that it was so well written and again, written by a palaeontologist. What is it that makes them such good writers? Well, I think it might have something to do with the fact that while the rest of science is focused on specialising to a nearly absurd level - palaeontologists are required to be generalists. They need to know geology to know how old rocks are, they need to know chemistry to know how bodily processes or rock processes or uranium processes work, they need to know physics (or at least physical chemistry) to understand why fossils don't form in basalt, and they absolutely need to know a little theology because - well, because you know why. Also anatomy, DNA and physiology of many, many animals.

Someone once said all science is either physics or it is stamp collecting - I think this book goes quite some way to showing that 'stamp collecting' has very many payoffs and physics has little to be quite so smug about.

I think it might be the fact that there is so much they need to know, so many bits and pieces of knowledge - the fact that they need to be generalists - that makes them such good science writers. And this guy really is a very good science writer.


Years ago I worked with a couple of Fundamentalist Christians. When we were talking one day one of them became outraged and said to me, "Do you really think I'm related to a FISH".

I had no idea how to answer him at first. Given Christians are quite fond of fish (Peter and all that - well, and those stickers they put on the back of their cars) it took me a second to work out the problem. I had also been expecting APE - so when he got worked up over fish, well, I wasn't sure what had happened. I told him it was worse than he even imagined - I didn't want him to take it personally, but actually I thought he was related to a bacteria. He didn't seem to find this a much more comforting notion and looked at me as if I was completely insane. He wasn't the first, he won't be the last.

This book does not waste time arguing with fundies - and that has to be a good thing. Already there has been far too many trees cut down and turned to paper in a pointless attempt to achieve the impossible - that is, to convince those who have no interest in understanding that their God just didn't create the world 4,000 years ago - I've decided that it is best to just ignore these people. They have self-selected themselves to a life of ignorance and blindness, unfortunately, nothing can be done for them - and whilst this is terribly sad, it is, nonetheless, a fact of life.

What this book does do is work its way through your body and show interesting little facts about residual properties we have that are there due to our ancestry. And not just our paternal grandfather, Herbert St George, but those fish my fundamentalist friend was so outraged over. And more - down into the deep dark past when we were not even yet fish, back when we were yeast or something similar.

Because that is one of the truly fascinating insights that fundamentalist Christians will never get to grasp - the 'theory' of evolution allows us to make remarkable predictions about how we live and how we have come to be the way we are. Those predictions allow us to delve into our genetic heritage and to make sense of where we have come from - and that knowledge, that insight, is not barren (in the sense that saying 'God did it' is barren), but rather allows us ways to potentially find solutions to some of our life's ongoing ills. For me the end of this book was by far the most interesting - the part where he explains why some many of us suffer from haemorrhoids or varicose veins or hernias.

Our inner fish can sometimes seem to have had it in for us. His explanation of the evolutionary choices that are made by animals (I mean that metaphorically, obviously) particularly around whether to see in colour or in black and white, is truly fascinating. I also learnt what is happening in my ear when I drink too much alcohol and the room starts spinning - and who would have thought that your eyes would tend to move to the right due to this misperception of a spinning room? Fascinating.

In fact, the book is full of little bits of information about bodily processes I have experienced, but never really understood. And that is always a nice thing to find out. We do tend to spend quite a bit of time in our bodies and being told what they are up to can be quite something.

This book is worth reading for his discussion on embryology alone, if you know nothing about this fascinating subject you should rush out and get hold of this book. I also enjoyed it for the stuff about dolphins not being able to smell, due to their on-again / off-again relationship with the sea.

I also enjoyed him talking about the nerves in the face and how these twist and turn in ways one would never get them to do if one was 'designing' their function from scratch, so to speak. Not that this was actually what interested me, what really interested me was the discussion of the various muscles of the face that make us frown and smile or do things like that. I had a chicken/egg moment where I wondered which came first, the ability to frown to display perplexity - or was this something that was selected for so that the muscle become 'honed' over time, or generations rather?

This was a fascinating book, with lots of asides to chew over - if you are interested in how we got here and how much of our inner fish is still obvious about us - this is a great book to read - now it is my turn to recommend it