Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

For the record, in my review of this book I'm going to take it as a given that human beings did, indeed, evolve from fish. You may or may not agree with this, and you may or may not agree that believing this is a possibility fits in with a gospel perspective. Personally, I love learning about what science has told us about the world, and I've never really found anything that can't coexist alongside my religious beliefs. So, okay - I'll accept that the fossil record suggests we all evolved from fish. In which case this is an absolutely fascinating book, and it caused me to look at the human body from a very different and very interesting perspective.

Neil Shubin is a paleontologist, and in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body he takes the reader through tools that are used to study the human body without actually studying the human body itself, tools that widen our understanding by showing how we are related to other living organisms, and to the organisms that have populated our planet in the past. These tools include studying the fossil record, observing animal embryos, and playing with DNA. Shubin's purpose is to show how our bodies came to be what they are, and to show that this sort of knowledge is not just intrinsically interesting, but incredibly useful.

The book has a big idea to get across, but it is also sprinkled with all sorts of fun little facts, like what causes hiccups or motion sickness, and why people have trouble walking in a straight line when they are drunk, and how to cause a fly to grow an eye on its leg (eww). It's well written, and well organized, and simultaneously informative and entertaining, like a good popular science book should be. It wasn't as explanatory as I felt it promised to be - it showed how more than it told why. But it was a really interesting look at a field I honestly don't know much about.