Meet Your Inner Fish—and a few other animals left inside you

Tuesday, 22 April 2014

Meet Your Inner Fish—and a few other animals left inside you

Science Focus

Shubin along with Tiktaalik, a fossil fish that made him famous.

Image courtesy of PBS.

Neil Shubin's day job consists of two apparently unrelated tasks. He teaches anatomy to medical students at the University of Chicago, and he studies evolution by looking at fossils of ancient fish (he also runs a lab that experiments on modern ones). But the work he does while moonlighting as a popularizer of science neatly ties these two things together. The human anatomy has deep roots in the evolutionary past, and some of our key features date back to an odd-looking fish called Tiktaalik that Shubin found high in the Canadian Arctic.

That find seems to have been what launched Shubin's career as a communicator. His first book, Your Inner Fish, was published in 2009, and it features Tiktaalik on its cover. The themes of that book have now been made into a three-part television series, which will begin airing on PBS tomorrow night.

Big ideas like human evolution take in concepts from a huge variety of fields, as different people tackle individual problems using a variety of methods that are largely unrelated to each other. The tools Shubin uses to dig for fossils, for example, have little to do with the ones his lab uses to manipulate the development of fish embryos. So it's often good to have an overarching metaphor to provide some conceptual organization to the chaos. Cosmos has its cosmic calendar and ship of the imagination; Your Inner Fish guides its viewers using the tree of life.

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