<img alt=“ruth fish image.JPG” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/ruth%20fish%20image.JPG” width=“220” height=“339” border=0 hspace=10 align=“right” />Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and we are posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 15 September.

Your Inner Fish – A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

In the 1980s molecular biology posed a threat to whole organism research: anatomists were out of date, and palaeontologists positively behind the times, according to fossil hunter Neil Shubin.

Twenty years on Shubin straddles the disciplines; uncovering new specimens and investigating the role of DNA in development. His well-paced book describes this and more with a wide-eyed wonder that cannot fail to captivate the reader.

Shubin cuts to the chase from the off; detailing his rookie fossil hunting and the later planning and breathy excitement of expeditions to Alaska where the famous fossil fish Tiktaalik roseae was discovered.

Using Tiktaalik as a window, each chapter takes us deeper into anatomy – from fins and limbs to eyes and ears via the cells that make up the body, or in early cases cells that make no body. Each example illustrates the changes through time and similarities across the animal kingdom.

The description is evocative: spooky undergraduate nights surrounded by bodies in an anatomy lab, or cracking plaster coverings that protect rocks brought back from the Arctic where ‘even the smell of the Tundra comes wafting out’. Whether gallivanting over rocks or peering down a microscope Shubin’s writing is passionate and his sense of adventure is evident.

Over dinner recently, bringing up the topic of these reviews, I pulled this book out of my bag. My companion, a working scientist, was unimpressed by its diagrams, claiming they were too basic. She needs a detailed picture in order to fully grasp an idea, but the pictures in My Inner Fish are simple. I think they suit the accessibility and clarity of Shubin’s writing . For me, the pictures are an added extra – his descriptions alone suffice. What do you think?

Appropriate as it may be to read such a book in this Darwin anniversary year, the relevance will not be lost, nor the sense of adventure faded if you don’t open it until 2010.

Previously on Ruth’s Reviews

Ruth’s Reviews: the Drunkard’s Walk

Disclaimer: As Nature’s Head of Press I have promoted some of Shubin’s research, including the Nature paper describing Tiktaalik roseae referred to in chapter one.