"Neil Shubin: Your Inner fish" a success by any standard

Neil Shubin’s latest book on evolutionary theory is by all standards a great success. It ranks around 200 in Amazon books and first in Evolution Science Books. When I checked the book’s availability in our library system there were close to 40 pending holds.

A sales rank of 200 means 225-250 books per week are sold. Compare this to a rank of 24,000 for Behe’s boo “Edge of Evolution” sold at a bargain price of $6.99 down from $28.00 or 111,550 for the regular priced version. Those numbers translate to few copies per month being sold.

Neil Shubin is a professor of organismal biology at the University of Chicago. He, as part of a team of scientists, discovered the now infamous Titaalik transitional fossil which causes so much consternation amongst Intelligent Design Creationists. His book Your Inner Fish introduces its readers to an exciting overview of how our evolutionary history links us back to a common ancestor with fish. Of course, that’s not where our common ancestry ends.

Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today’s most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.

In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria.

Nova has an exciting video Podcast on Tiktaalik.

Nova’s in-depth expose “Jugment day: Intelligent Design on Trial” discusses Tiktaalik.

On Youtube we find many more fascinating videos about Shubin’s book and his work.

Sales Rank