Events
August 14
“The RIGHT STUFF”
in the Right Place -
Grant Park!
8:00pm (rain or shine)
Grant Park, Butler Field
Get Involved in an
Exciting Science Project
The Genographic Project
World Community Grid
SETI@Home
Your Inner Fish
Montgomery Ward Hall
Field Museum
Paleontologist Neil Shubin unites the discoveries of fossils and the sciences of paleontology and genetics with his experience of teaching human anatomy in a new popular book Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.
“The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals,” Shubin writes in his new book, which will be available Jan. 15. “The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are often simpler versions of ours.”
In Your Inner Fish, Shubin, Ph.D., professor and associate dean for organismal and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, and provost of the Field Museum, uses new fossil finds, genetic discoveries and animal anatomy to trace the origins of humans and the evolution of different body parts, such as limbs, teeth, head, ears and eyes. He explains how everything that is apparently unique about humans is built from parts that are shared with other creatures.
The hardcover 240-page book will be available on line and at major bookstores beginning Jan.15, 2008. Shubin will give a book lecture at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 26, in Montgomery Ward Hall at the Field Museum. The lecture is free with basic admission to the Field. The book will be available for sale outside the lecture hall before and after the presentation. Shubin is scheduled to sign books afterward.
Publisher Pantheon Books of New York has announced an initial print run of 50,000 copies. An audio version of the book is planned, and the book already is being translated into Japanese, German, French, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian and Dutch. Book illustrations are by Kalliopi Monoyios, a scientific illustrator in Shubin’s lab at Chicago.
“I was hooked from the first chapter,” writes paleoanthropologist Don Johanson, Ph.D., director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, and co-discoverer of Lucy. “Creationists will want this book banned because it presents irrefutable evidence for a transitional creature that set the stage for the journey from sea to land. This engaging book combines the excitement of discovery with the rigors of great scholarship to provide a convincing case of evolution from fish to man.”
And here’s what Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat; Musicophilia; and other books has to say about Shubin’s book:
"Your Inner Fish is my favorite sort of book--an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.
“Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher whose humor and intelligence and spellbinding narrative make this book an absolute delight. Your Inner Fish is not only a great read; it marks the debut of a science writer of the first rank. "
In collaboration with with the Illinois Science Council.
