Review With a writing style that is enabled by an obvious adoration of the subject, Neil Shubin explores the predecessors of the human species in his book Your Inner Fish. Shubin draws upon his unique background as a paleontologist, embryologist, and geneticist to trace defining phenotypical traits that are inherent to humans to even the simplest of organisms. He delves into the difficult details of evolution that have long remained mysteries until recent years, specifically analyzing the transition from water to land, the rise of vision, basic body plans and scent. The magic of the book is that although these discoveries required the brightest minds of the past two centuries, Shubin unwraps them in a delightful manner that is interesting to both high school student and university professor. Your Inner Fish is meant to be persuasive, to educate and formulate opinions. By tracking these seeming complexities of human development, Shubin attempts to persuade a broad audience in the veracity of the common ancestor. Although the premise of the book is based on evolution, Shubin’s purpose in writing the book cannot be defined by such broad terms. He is not interested in simply proving that evolution occurs; in fact, he treats such a consensus as being already understood. It is the actual mechanism that interests Shubin, the path that was taken by the common ancestor that eventually whereon organisms diverged and became the human species. The beginning of the book
3. What did further examination of Tiktaalik’s fins reveal about the creature and its’ lifestyle?
This is a paper about the book Finding Fish: A Memoir, which was written by Antwone Fisher. By necessity given the nature of the book, the main character will be examined at length. Through careful examination of the main character a deeper understanding of the book can be reached. After the examination, a number of theoretical perspectives will be applied to the main character, as well as an explanation of how these perspectives can be used to evaluate Antwone in order to understand him better. The perspectives that will be used will be the strengths, systems, conflict, humanistic, and psychodynamic perspectives. Following the connection of the perspectives to Antwone, an explanation of why social workers use theories and
Upon entering the circus, Edward spots a beautiful girl whom he vows to marry. However, she soon vanishes and he never learns her name. The ringmaster, Amos, agrees to provide Edward with clues about the girl each month that he works for him. He does everything Amos asks of him, which includes sticking his head in a lion’s mouth, washing an obese circus performer, cleaning up after the elephants, and being fired from a cannon. Edward completes every task with a smile knowing that he is one step closer to meeting his future wife.
Love can come from many different people. It is not always given by a family member. Love is not always given by a romantic interest, either. Sometimes love can be given by friends, especially in a time of need. This can be seen in Chris Crutcher’s short story Goin’ Fishin’. Goin’ Fishin’ is a short story about a boy named Lionel Serbousek, whose family is killed by his previous best friend, Neal Anderson. The story follows him through his grief. Throughout the story, Lionel’s friends are there to guide him through his grief and guard him from the outside world. Lionel’s friends love him like family.
Unit 1 ties into the theme of tolerance and the acceptance of others, as Barbara Jordan said it, “We, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves”. Whether it was the short story What of This Goldfish, Would You Wish? Or the newspaper editorial The American Flag Stands For Tolerance, the pieces dive into and explore the issues of acceptance among others.
Your Inner Fish is a book that explains evolutionary concepts from multiple different scientific viewpoints. It explains how fossils help us to understand where we started from, and how we evolved. It also explains how DNA can help us track where we came from and trace our ancestry.
It’s an alligator! It’s a crocodile! It’s a lizard! It’s.. a fish? All educated guesses even preschoolers can notice. The discovery of Tiktaalik has given many scientists something to think about. The first being that humans may after all be closely related to fish. When first hearing this theory, for anyone it is hard to believe. Humans have fingers and fishes have fins! They have gills and we have lungs! Many things point towards the fact that humans have nothing in common with fish until one looks at the bone structure of each and how exceptionally similar they are. The reason for the similarity is because both species share a common ancestor.
To understand how this pattern happens, scientists take a look at embryos. Sometimes they interfere with the development to see what occurs when things go wrong. Scientists use chicken eggs to study this. Just by adding a dab of vitamin A on a chicken embryo, you will get a mirror image of the embryo. The patch of tissue is called ZPA.
Neil Shubin, author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body” once said, “in a perfectly designed world-one with not history-we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer” (Shubin 185). In his account as a paleontologist, Shubin constructs a composition about our body’s history using fossils and DNA to compare the physical description of our body to that of the common fish. Upon reading his detailed scientific accounts, I can easily identify with a relation between his episodes and concepts from the general biology laboratory. Even though I was able to identify connections with course ideas and biological concepts throughout the book, I was immediately pulled to: “Handy Genes,” “The Best-Laid (Body) Plans,” and “Making Scents.”
The book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin is an interesting novel that shows the evolution of some of our major structures through time. We all know about evolution and the monkeys but we never really looked in on evolution through “our inner fish”. The book was appealing because it helps to understand how we have come to be with some of the parts of our bodies we take for granted, like how we got our developed smell or our advanced color vision. Your Inner Fish is a good way to jump into the evolution of our ancestors and become more knowledgeable about where we came from.
His discovery led to more questions than answers and Shubin was determined to answer as many as he could. Shubin makes the connection between all species that ever lived and man. An interesting theory I learned was that man has a really close relationship with fish as Shubin said “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 (3)”. Overall I learned a lot of things from reading this book, It answered a lot of my questions and changed some of my
Fishing is an activity I have enjoyed doing ever since I was a little kid. In fact, one of my first fishing voyages was with my grandpa when I was about eight years old. He was an avid fisherman who went fishing almost every day and knew everything there was to know about fishing. Grandpa got me hooked on fishing. After Grandpa died, my dad picked up where Grandpa left off. We had a pontoon, and Dad took my brothers and me fishing whenever we had the chance. To this day, I still love fishing just as much as I had on my first fishing trip with my grandpa. Many people enjoy hobbies that are relaxing and peaceful, and others prefer exhilarating activities that never have a dull moment. I enjoy fishing because it has some of both.
Humans are the most unique species on Earth. We have gained the ability to things never accomplished before on Earth. We can control our environment, domesticate other species, and more importantly, form complex connections and societies with one another. However, it is widely debated about how we evolved from simple ape-like foragers to the meat-eating, community-building species we are today. In this paper, we will be looking at three authors: Richard Wrangham, Pat Shipman, and Frans de Wall. Each of which approach this question from different directions.
Understanding human evolutions is important for identifying the stages of humanity and for understanding how our societies have developed. When most of us think about human
Garreau, Joel. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies- and What It Means to Be Human. New York: Random House, 2005. Print.