Shubin deftly intersperses his life experiences, such as his excursions to the Arctic and the discovery of Tiktaalik with the facts that he uses to support his claim. Now that I’ve waxed poetic about the presentation of Your Inner Fish‘s central argument, let’s talk about how that argument is presented. Through the presentation and language choice that Shubin utilizes in this novel, he makes the information readily available and easily accessible to people with even a high school biology class level understanding of Evolution.

Had the discovery of Tiktaalik and the idea that it is one of our earliest ancestors been presented in a different way, such as how many of the papers and articles that comprise science’s primary literature are presented, the chapter could easily have become boring and quickly would have lost the reader’s attention. The presentation of the central argument is not what I was expecting when I checked the novel out from the library although, I was pleasantly surprised by how Shubin interweaves various facts that support his argument within the anecdotes that comprise each chapter. The remaining nine chapters each focus on their respective elements of human anatomy, which are as follows: hands/wrists/arms, genes, teeth, the head, body plans, bodies, our sense of smell, vision, and ears. Conversely, the final chapter acts as a capstone to the novel by presenting the idea that all living things are connected in one way or another by Evolution. In the first chapter of Your Inner Fish Shubin establishes the rules of the book by introducing the reader to several things: himself and his world, the core argument of this novel, to Tiktaalik, and to the approach this novel will take to conveying Shubin’s argument. Your Inner Fish is divided into eleven chapters, with each functioning as a self-contained guide to the evolutionary path of a specific part of the human body, save for the first and last chapters. Welcome to the wonderful world of Paleontology. Is it possible that all terrestrial life be descended from a particular type of fish that lived 375 million years ago in the late Denovian Period? This question is the heart of Niel Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, in which Shubin argues that a fish that seems to be a halfway point between fish and Tetrapod, Tiktaalik, is indeed the “missing link” -so to speak- between fish and terrestrial animals.

The inner fish book