Your Inner Fish

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Paleontologist Neil Shubin begins with a brief account of his role in discovering an ancient creature intermediate between a fish and a land animal. Its fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, and the creature was given the Inuit name Tiktaalik.

Later, Shubin pays another visit to Canada, this time the fossil beds near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy. There they found rare fossils of the tritheledont, a reptile whose teeth showed mammalian characteristics.

Shubin uses these events to anchor a description of how our anatomy contains links to more primitive creatures. For example: "Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human."

Following are a number of observations that I found interesting.  

Human Embryos

1. They have four gill arches, which ultimately develop into jaws, ears, larynx and throat.

2. They have a notochord, which breaks up and forms the disks that cushion our vertebrae.

3. At an early stage in their development, their elbows and knees face the same direction, as do fish and amphibians.

4. Gonads are initially located high up in the body, as in fish.

Evolution

1. Two factors may have been involved in the evolution of bodies: predation, and the rise in atmospheric oxygen.

2. "The origin of mammals involved not only new patterns of chewing...but new ways of hearing... Bones originally used by reptiles to chew evolved in mammals to assist in hearing."

Genetics

Shubin also describes some of the Dr. Moreau-like tinkering that scientists have done in order to understand how genes work. Some of the genes he mentions are Noggin, Pax 6, and Sonic hedgehog.

1. Genes from the embryo of one animal (e.g. a mouse), when grafted to the embryo of another (e.g. a shark), can perform the same function.  This leads to a conclusion such as: "all appendages, whether they are fins or limbs, are built by similar kinds of genes."

2. "Inject extra amounts of frog Noggin into a frog egg, and the frog will grow extra back structures, sometimes even a second head."

3. Turning on an "eyeless" gene can result in creatures growing eyes virtually anywhere on the body. For example, "they could use the mouse gene to trigger the formation of an extra fly eye anywhere: on the back, on a wing, near the mouth."

Trivia

1. Fish have no necks.

2. Tooth replacement in reptiles continues throughout their entire lives.

3. Some creatures, like single-celled microbes, have no body at all.

4. Some creatures have no anus, they expel waste through their mouth e.g. jellyfish and corals.

Gould's Book of Fish

A Novel in 12 Fish

This is an outrageous fictional account of the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould, who in the early part of the 19th century was transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) for stealing a coat.

The Commandant of the penal colony is a felon himself, having appropriated the identity of a dead English lieutenant. He corresponds with the lieutenant’s sister, who later turns out to be a famous English opium-eater. He wears a gold mask to hide his chancre-ridden face, and diverts himself by riding a locomotive around a circular track and gazing at painted vistas provided by Gould.

The Surgeon, who has hopes of being admitted to the Royal Society, enlists Gould to paint fish, and sends barrels of pickled heads to an English phrenologist. When the Surgeon meets an untimely end, his bones get sent to England too, resulting in a comic scientific mixup.

Gould becomes obsessed with fish. He confuses the people around him with the fish he is painting. He lives in a saltwater cell. He turns into a fish. His book finds its way into the hands of a 20th century purveyor of fake antique furniture named Sid Hammet. Sid turns into a fish.

Each of the 12 chapters is named after a fish and accompanied by a beautiful reproduction from the real William Gould. In the hardcover version there are magnificently marbled endpapers, which resemble a tidepool, and ink colour varies by chapter, reflecting the handmade ink that Gould himself is using. The writing is ornate and grotesque:

As I bob about my cell now I think back on it, we were not surprised when we felt upon us as an implacable hatred the malignant stare of that unholy army of the persecuted—filthy little clawscrunts & half-starved wretches, their pus-filled eyes poking like buttercups out of scaled scabby faces, their misshapen backs hacked & harrowed out of any matural form by endless applications of the Lash; brawn-fallen, belly-pinched wrecks of men bent & broken long before their time, the one I thought the oldest only thirty-two years of age.

This is an entertaining, though at times mystifying, recursive fish story.

Marbled endpapers

Historical Note

Several times the novel mentions Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land. He was recalled in 1836 and the following year installed as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Arthur’s replacement was Sir John Franklin, who governed until 1843, when he was removed from power without warning. Stung by this disgrace, Franklin set out two years later on his final expedition from which no one survived.

The book concludes with a doctored biographical note on Gould. His real bio can be found here.