Book: Your Inner Fish
I finally finished "Your Inner Fish". It's a good science book, I was just so over scheduled that I really didn't have time to read at all. The hard copy of the book I have already returned to the library, late (sorry Katrina, I know you wanted to check it out), and unfinished- I still had a chapter left! Luckily, I had burbled about the book to The Honey and he had picked up the ebook version of it, so I was able to finish it that way.
Neil Shubin is a paleontologist who had to teach human gross anatomy classes, and he noted how the things he knows about ancient critters help describe the whys of how the human body's system is put together. At first, I thought he had an unhealthy, West-World ish fascination with hands (in the movie, an android populated theme park went predictably haywire and started killing the guests, and the humans could tell if the being they were talking to was an android or not by looking at their hands, which were too complex to make realistic.). However, after a very thorough discussion of how fins developed into fingers, he next moved to teeth and did the same thing, along the way explaining how teeth and bones are different, why, and how expensive teeth are to the organism. Other chapters discuss body orientation, means of smelling, and of course vision, with plenty of examples surrounding, showing where the mutation split from the primitive critters and how it was a benefit.
There are scores of videos of evangelical conservatives who don't believe evolution should be taught in school, repeating endlessly "show us the proof" who really need to be handed this book. Alas, they won't read it and have no idea what "proof" means in a scientific sense. They are quite willing to reap the benefits when science figures out stuff like insulin when our bodies, evolved for one state, behave erratically when we subject them to another state. The final chapter discusses several holdovers from other body types that our ancestors had, and how they effect us - hiccups, for instance, appear to be a inherited from tadpoles switching over from gills to lungs, remembering a time when we used to be fish.
