Your inner fish A journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body

Neil Shubin

Book - 2008

Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.--From publisher description.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Pantheon Books c2008.
Language
English
Main Author
Neil Shubin (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
229 p. : ill., maps ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780375424472
  • Preface
  • 1. Finding Your Inner Fish
  • 2. Getting a Grip
  • 3. Handy Genes
  • 4. Teeth Everywhere
  • 5. Getting Ahead
  • 6. The Best-Laid (Body) Plans
  • 7. Adventures in Bodybuilding
  • 8. Making Scents
  • 9. Vision
  • 10. Ears
  • 11. The Meaning of It All
  • Epilogue
  • Notes, References, and Further Reading
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

There has been much discussion by historians and/or philosophers of biology, especially Michael Ruse, about the preoccupation of evolutionary biologists with progress--the concept that evolution works toward an end, even if that end is not seen as purposive or evolution as directed. The notion can be hard to avoid, especially in a popular work. At one level this account of human origins, charmingly written as it is, places humans at the apex of evolution and evaluates 3.5 billion years of organismal evolution as a journey whose end is the human body. The same approach could have been, and indeed has been, taken to illuminate the rabbit body, the echinoderm body, even the worm body. The book is as much a statement of the journey taken by Shubin (Univ. of Chicago) as a scientist as it is an account for the layperson of humankind's long evolutionary history. No specialized background is required to appreciate the journey as Shubin portrays it; the style is engaging, the examples are well chosen, the figures simple. There are no phylogenies, and the roles of complex genes are made accessible with metaphors all readers can understand and appreciate. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. B. K. Hall Dalhousie University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The antievolution crowd is always asking where the missing links in the descent of man are. Well, paleontologist Shubin actually discovered one, a fish that thrust itself up on its fins and crawled. A crackerjack comparative anatomist, he uses his find to launch a voyage of discovery about the evolutionary evidence we can readily see at hand and it's our own hands. Also teeth, head, spine, sensory organs, and other body constituents and body properties, such as symmetry, that the continuing combined research of paleontology, genetics, and genomics is showing us we rightly see as highly analogous among species. The history of evolution is the development of the body, from the first agglomeration of cells that functioned as a whole to human and other animal frames. Quite apart from the testimony of fossils, which overwhelmingly lack soft structures, genes held in common by species ranging from fossils to primitive animals to humans are now being linked to specific anatomical features, arguing very strongly the common lineage of that range of creatures. Despite some distracting grammatical tics, Shubin relays all this exciting evidence and reasoning so clearly that no general-interest library should be without this book.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Fish paleontologist Shubin illuminates the subject of evolution with humor and clarity in this compelling look at how the human body evolved into its present state. Parsing the millennia-old genetic history of human form is a natural project for Shubin, who chairs the department of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, and was co-discoverer of Tiktaalik, a 375-million-year-old fossil fish whose flat skull, limbs and finger, toe, ankle and wrist bones, provide a link between fish and the earliest land-dwelling creatures. Shubin moves smoothly through the anatomical spectrum, finding ancient precursors to human teeth in a 200-million-year-old fossil of the mouse-size "part animal, part reptile" tritheledont; he also notes cellular similarities between humans and sponges. Other fossils reveal the origins of our senses, from the eye , to that "wonderful Rube Goldberg contraption," the ear. Shubin excels at explaining the science, making each discovery an adventure, whether to a Pennsylvania roadcut or a stony outcrop beset by polar bears and howling Arctic winds. "I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity... nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that ever lived...," he writes, and curious readers are likely to agree. Illus. (Jan. 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

For his first book, Shubin (anatomy, Univ. of Chicago) has written a lively little volume for a general readership on the evolutionary legacy, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, of our bodies. The author is especially qualified to address this topic: an evolutionary developmental biologist with groundbreaking research programs in both paleontology and developmental genetics, Shubin also teaches human anatomy to medical students. One of the main players of the book is Tiktaalik, a 375 million-year-old fossil fish from the Arctic that Shubin and his research team discovered in 2004. This fish, the fish of the book title, had fins but also is the earliest known creature to have a neck and wrists, features usually associated with land vertebrates such as ourselves. Other chapters on the hand, the head, general body plans, the teeth, the sense organs, and various ailments address their evolutionary origins and the evidence of their beginnings within our bodies. This book is a wonder-filled introduction to our evolutionary heritage for lower-level undergraduates and the general public. This reviewer also hopes that Shubin will eventually write a book for more academic and advanced readers (in the manner of Sean Carroll). Highly recommended.--Walter L. Cressler, West Chester Univ. Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

How human bones, organs and behavior reveal the history we share with fish, flies, worms and germs. Shubin (Organismal Biology and Anatomy/Univ. of Chicago) made the front page of the New York Times in 2006 when he discovered a 375-million-year-old fossil fish whose fins contained rudimentary limb bones, perhaps the earliest ancestor of the first creatures that left the sea to live on land. This ancient limb consisted of a single upper bone followed by two lower bones followed by a collection of primitive wrist bones--the same structure, Shubin emphasizes, found today in the limbs of all walking animals, including humans. (It would be a devastating argument against evolution to find a creature with a different pattern of limb bones, but so far that has not happened.) The author traces the history of other body parts--teeth, head, ears, eyes--as far as they go, often billions of years. He also explores how each creature's DNA assembles a complete individual from a few identical cells. It turns out nature works as economically in embryonic development as it does in evolution. A fish and a human look identical for weeks after fertilization. The segments of DNA that produce proteins to guide the growth of a shark's fin and a human arm are almost identical, and they go about their work in ways that haven't changed in 500 million years. Researchers have injected a mouse limb-development protein inside a fish egg to replace the fish equivalent, and the fish grows normal fins. A skillful writer, paleontologist Shubin conveys infectious enthusiasm and illustrates his points with dozens of drawings, sketches, tables and photographs. Even readers with only a layperson's knowledge of evolution will learn marvelous things about the unity of all organisms since the beginning of life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

FINDING YOUR INNER FISH Typical summers of my adult life are spent in snow and sleet, cracking rocks on cliffs well north of the Arctic Circle. Most of the time I freeze, get blisters, and find absolutely nothing. But if I have any luck, I find ancient fish bones. That may not sound like buried treasure to most people, but to me it is more valuable than gold. Ancient fish bones can be a path to knowledge about who we are and how we got that way. We learn about our own bodies in seemingly bizarre places, ranging from the fossils of worms and fish recovered from rocks from around the world to the DNA in virtually every animal alive on earth today. But that does not explain my confidence about why skeletal remains from the past--and the remains of fish, no less--offer clues about the fundamental structure of our bodies. How can we visualize events that happened millions and, in many cases, billions of years ago? Unfortunately, there were no eyewitnesses; none of us was around. In fact, nothing that talks or has a mouth or even a head was around for most of this time. Even worse, the animals that existed back then have been dead and buried for so long their bodies are only rarely preserved. If you consider that over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct, that only a very small fraction are preserved as fossils, and that an even smaller fraction still are ever found, then any attempt to see our past seems doomed from the start. DIGGING FOSSILS--SEEING OURSELVES I first saw one of our inner fish on a snowy July afternoon while studying 375-million-year-old rocks on Ellesmere Island, at a latitude about 80 degrees north. My colleagues and I had traveled up to this desolate part of the world to try to discover one of the key stages in the shift from fish to land-living animals. Sticking out of the rocks was the snout of a fish. And not just any fish: a fish with a flat head. Once we saw the flat head we knew we were onto something. If more of this skeleton were found inside the cliff, it would reveal the early stages in the history of our skull, our neck, even our limbs. What did a flat head tell me about the shift from sea to land? More relevant to my personal safety and comfort, why was I in the Arctic and not in Hawaii? The answers to these questions lie in the story of how we find fossils and how we use them to decipher our own past. Fossils are one of the major lines of evidence that we use to understand ourselves. (Genes and embryos are others, which I will discuss later.) Most people do not know that finding fossils is something we can often do with surprising precision and predictability. We work at home to maximize our chances of success in the field. Then we let luck take over. The paradoxical relationship between planning and chance is best described by Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous remark about warfare: "In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless." This captures field paleontology in a nutshell. We make all kinds of plans to get us to promising fossil sites. Once we're there, the entire field plan may be thrown out the window. Facts on the ground can change our best-laid plans. Yet we can design expeditions to answer specific scientific questions. Using a few simple ideas, which I'll talk about below, we can predict where important fossils might be found. Of course, we are not successful 100 percent of the time, but we strike it rich often enough to make things interesting. I have made a career out of doing just that: finding early mammals to answer questions of mammal origins, the earliest frogs to answer questions of frog origins, and some of the earliest limbed animals to understand the origins of land-living animals. In many ways, field paleontologists have a significantly easier time finding new sites today than we ever did before. We know more about the geology of local areas, thanks to the geological exploration undertaken by local governments and oil and gas companies. The Internet gives us rapid access to maps, survey information, and aerial photos. I can even scan your backyard for promising fossil sites right from my laptop. To top it off, imaging and radiographic devices can see through some kinds of rock and allow us to visualize the bones inside. Despite these advances, the hunt for the important fossils is much what it was a hundred years ago. Paleontologists still need to look at rock--literally to crawl over it--and the fossils within must often be removed by hand. So many decisions need to be made when prospecting for and removing fossil bone that these processes are difficult to automate. Besides, looking at a monitor screen to find fossils would never be nearly as much fun as actually digging for them. What makes this tricky is that fossil sites are rare. To maximize our odds of success, we look for the convergence of three things. We look for places that have rocks of the right age, rocks of the right type to preserve fossils, and rocks that are exposed at the surface. There is another factor: serendipity. That I will show by example. Our example will show us one of the great transitions in the history of life: the invasion of land by fish. For billions of years, all life lived only in water. Then, as of about 365 million years ago, creatures also inhabited land. Life in these two environments is radically different. Breathing in water requires very different organs than breathing in air. The same is true for excretion, feeding, and moving about. A whole new kind of body had to arise. At first glance, the divide between the two environments appears almost unbridgeable. But everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened. In seeking rocks of the right age, we have a remarkable fact on our side. The fossils in the rocks of the world are not arranged at random. Where they sit, and what lies inside them, is most definitely ordered, and we can use this order to design our expeditions. Billions of years of change have left layer upon layer of different kinds of rock in the earth. The working assumption, which is easy to test, is that rocks on the top are younger than rocks on the bottom; this is usually true in areas that have a straightforward, layer-cake arrangement (think the Grand Canyon). But movements of the earth's crust can cause faults that shift the position of the layers, putting older rocks on top of younger ones. Fortunately, once the positions of these faults are recognized, we can often piece the original sequence of layers back together. The fossils inside these rock layers also follow a progression, with lower layers containing species entirely different from those in the layers above. If we could quarry a single column of rock that contained the entire history of life, we would find an extraordinary range of fossils. The lowest layers would contain little visible evidence of life. Layers above them would contain impressions of a diverse set of jellyfish-like things. Layers still higher would have creatures with skeletons, appendages, and various organs, such as eyes. Above those would be layers with the first animals to have backbones. And so on. The layers with the first people would be found higher still. Of course, a single column containing the entirety of earth history does not exist. Rather, the rocks in each location on earth represent only a small sliver of time. To get the whole picture, we need to put the pieces together by comparing the rocks themselves and the fossils inside them, much as if working a giant jigsaw puzzle. That a column of rocks has a progression of fossil species probably comes as no surprise. Less obvious is that we can make detailed predictions about what the species in each layer might actually look like, by comparing them with species of animals that are alive today; this information helps us to predict the kinds of fossils we will find in ancient rock layers. In fact, the fossil sequences in the world's rocks can be predicted by comparing ourselves with the animals at our local zoo or aquarium. How can a walk through the zoo help us predict where we should look in the rocks to find important fossils? A zoo offers a great variety of creatures that are all distinct in many ways. But let's not focus on what makes them distinct; to pull off our prediction, we need to focus on what different creatures share. We can then use the features common to all species to identify groups of creatures with similar traits. All the living things can be organized and arranged like a set of Russian nesting dolls, with smaller groups of animals comprised in bigger groups of animals. When we do this, we discover something very fundamental about nature. Every species in the zoo and the aquarium has a head and two eyes. Call these species "Everythings." A subset of the creatures with a head and two eyes has limbs. Call the limbed species "Everythings with limbs." A subset of these headed and limbed creatures has a huge brain, walks on two feet, and speaks. That subset is us, humans. We could, of course, use this way of categorizing things to make many more subsets, but even this threefold division has predictive power. The fossils inside the rocks of the world generally follow this order, and we can put it to use in designing new expeditions. To use the example above, the first member of the group "Everythings," a creature with a head and two eyes, is found in the fossil record well before the first "Everything with limbs." More precisely, the first fish (a card-carrying member of the "Everythings") appears before the first amphibian (an "Everything with limbs"). Obviously, we refine this by looking at more kinds of animals and many more characteristics that groups of them share, as well as by assessing the actual age of the rocks themselves. In our labs, we do exactly this type of analysis with thousands upon thousands of characteristics and species. We look at every bit of anatomy we can, and often at large chunks of DNA. There are so much data that we often need powerful computers to show us the groups within groups. This approach is the foundation of biology, because it enables us to make hypotheses about how creatures are related to one another. Besides helping us refine the groupings of life, hundreds of years of fossil collection have produced a vast library, or catalogue, of the ages of the earth and the life on it. We can now identify general time periods when major changes occurred. Interested in the origin of mammals? Go to rocks from the period called the Early Mesozoic; geochemistry tells us that these rocks are likely about 210 million years old. Interested in the origin of primates? Go higher in the rock column, to the Cretaceous period, where rocks are about 80 million years old. The order of fossils in the world's rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life. If, digging in 600-million-year-old rocks, we found the earliest jellyfish lying next to the skeleton of a woodchuck, then we would have to rewrite our texts. That woodchuck would have appeared earlier in the fossil record than the first mammal, reptile, or even fish--before even the first worm. Moreover, our ancient woodchuck would tell us that much of what we think we know about the history of the earth and life on it is wrong. Despite more than 150 years of people looking for fossils--on every continent of earth and in virtually every rock layer that is accessible--this observation has never been made. Let's now return to our problem of how to find relatives of the first fish to walk on land. In our grouping scheme, these creatures are somewhere between the "Everythings" and the "Everythings with limbs." Map this to what we know of the rocks, and there is strong geological evidence that the period from 380 million to 365 million years ago is the critical time. The younger rocks in that range, those about 360 million years old, include diverse kinds of fossilized animals that we would all recognize as amphibians or reptiles. My colleague Jenny Clack at Cambridge University and others have uncovered amphibians from rocks in Greenland that are about 365 million years old. With their necks, their ears, and their four legs, they do not look like fish. But in rocks that are about 385 million years old, we find whole fish that look like, well, fish. They have fins, conical heads, and scales; and they have no necks. Given this, it is probably no great surprise that we should focus on rocks about 375 million years old to find evidence of the transition between fish and land-living animals. We have settled on a time period to research, and so have identified the layers of the geological column we wish to investigate. Now the challenge is to find rocks that were formed under conditions capable of preserving fossils. Rocks form in different kinds of environments and these initial settings leave distinct signatures on the rock layers. Volcanic rocks are mostly out. No fish that we know of can live in lava. And even if such a fish existed, its fossilized bones would not survive the superheated conditions in which basalts, rhyolites, granites, and other igneous rocks are formed. We can also ignore metamorphic rocks, such as schist and marble, for they have undergone either superheating or extreme pressure since their initial formation. Whatever fossils might have been preserved in them have long since disappeared. Ideal to preserve fossils are sedimentary rocks: limestones, sandstones, siltstones, and shales. Compared with volcanic and metamorphic rocks, these are formed by more gentle processes, including the action of rivers, lakes, and seas. Not only are animals likely to live in such environments, but the sedimentary processes make these rocks more likely places to preserve fossils. For example, in an ocean or lake, particles constantly settle out of the water and are deposited on the bottom. Over time, as these particles accumulate, they are compressed by new, overriding layers. The gradual compression, coupled with chemical processes happening inside the rocks over long periods of time, means that any skeletons contained in the rocks stand a decent chance of fossilizing. Similar processes happen in and along streams. The general rule is that the gentler the flow of the stream or river, the better preserved the fossils. Excerpted from Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3. 5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.