Sunday, February 10, 2008

Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish and More on Darwin Day



Tuesday, Feb. 12 is the anniversary of Darwin's birthday, and has been dubbed Darwin Day. In celebration of Darwin's scientific achievement, many organizations are holding Darwin Day events.

Over at Scientific Blogging, we're celebrating with a feature page chock full of Darwin Day articles, links to Darwin Day blogging around the web, and highlights of events around the country. If you have a blog post you'd like highlighted for Darwin Day, head on over there, download the badge, and we'll put up a link to your post.

Included is my review of Neil Shubin's recent book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-billion-year history of the Human Body. Just to get you started, here is the first paragraph:

“ 'What does the body of a professor share with a blob?' Neil Shubin answers this and other questions about the evolutionary history of our anatomy in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into The 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon, 2008). As an undergraduate student considering a research career in science, I once endured a 7 AM human anatomy course. In my semi-conscious state, breathing the slightly disturbing fumes of the preservative that the teaching assistant kept spraying on the cadavers, I was thinking, ‘this is morbidly fascinating, but really not that relevant to what scientists do today.’ If Neil Shubin had been teaching my anatomy course, I wouldn’t have struggled to get out of bed and make it to class on time. His book is a fun, compelling tour of the evolutionary history of the human body, filled with dozens of examples that nicely illustrate why biology only makes real sense when it is understood in the context of evolution."

Go read the rest over at Scientific Blogging

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