Tired of Boring Scientific Novels? Try Your Inner Fish
With all that is happening around us, it is incredibly easy to forget about the bodily systems that have made it possible. Even easier is to forget where such systems came from. Neil Shubin’s informational monograph Your Inner Fish describes all of this masterfully. His personal experiences in many fields of evolutionary biology, combined with his humorous way of writing, make this one of the most captivating and fascinating reads that you will encounter. For this, it receives a rating of five out of five stars.
The single most important aspect of an informational novel like Your Inner Fish is the facts. Of course, other factors are also important, but if a nonfiction work contains faulty or outdated information, that hurts its reliability significantly. Shubin’s novel, however, has no such flaws. As a paleontologist, embryologist, anatomist, and evolutionary biologist, Shubin is incredibly qualified to write about a topic like the wonderful evolutionary history of the human body. If this still somehow proves not to be satisfactory, Shubin himself even discovered an important fish fossil, hence the title, that answers many questions regarding how the human body came to be. How can a prehistoric fish correlate to the human body? Read the book to find out. Despite this, he is still humble and polite enough to include an entire twelve pages of sources and further readings. With his many qualifications, past experiences, and sources, Shubin is an especially trustworthy source to be reading from.
Even knowing that all the knowledge provided by the book is true, many readers might still be turned off by the idea of reading a scientific book. After all, all scientific books are full of boring nonsense, right? Will Neil Shubin prove that idea to be wrong, as his humorous and lively tone of writing makes reading this book feel more like watching your favorite television show than studying a scientific novel. His entertaining descriptions of past experiences only add to the overall charm of the experience. Shubin also compares many scientific concepts to casual ones, making the book easier to understand and even more enjoyable. While many of us might consider reading a scientific monograph like Your Inner Fish a chore, Shubin’s amusing voice allows this splendid novel to captivate non-science-oriented as well as more scientifically oriented ones.
Another problem with reading a book full to the brim with scientific words and concepts is not understanding them, as these types of novels often require prior knowledge of these ideas to be educational. Your Inner Fish needs little to no prior knowledge to read. If you can understand standard English words on a page, you will understand the entirety of Your Inner Fish, as this book seems to have been written with a wider audience in mind. By utilizing clever analogies to everyday ideas and including detailed descriptions, Shubin makes understanding scientific concepts a breeze. By the end of this book, phrases like olfactory epithelium will make perfect sense. It may feel daunting to attempt to read a scientific monograph, but Shubin’s descriptions and comparisons will help you understand many fundamental scientific concepts that correlate to the history of our body systems.
Your Inner Fish is a brilliant monograph that can help anyone, especially non-scientists, understand the fascinating evolutionary history of our body. With its trustworthy information, entertaining voice, and being easy to understand, Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish is a must-read for any human curious about their evolutionary origins.
