YIF: Chapter 11

This chapter is the final chapter in the book Your Inner fish and is appropriately titled "Meaning of it all." In this chapter Shubin first tells us about evolution and how our genetic tree has developed over the past billion years. This is crucial for the rest of the chapter where he will talk about specifics that did not fit in the last 10 chapters. He relates our speech to that of primates and how they evolved together. Then talks briefly about how our fish and tadpole "ancestors" evolved and how we evolved from them and that is how we have hiccups. He explains that how hiccups are beneficial to fish in their breathing, whereas they are neither beneficial nor harmful for us humans. Lastly he talks about how our shark "ancestors" can help us, especially males, relate to getting hernias. The overall basis for these points in this chapter is the biological "law of everything" that states every living thing on the planet has had parents. The most important idea in the section was how we can link ourselves to each other and how all humans are related, no matter where from on earth, because we all evolved from a common point. The part I find intriguing is how we can tract this relationship with others. To do this we use a method similar to cladograms, except it is almost reversed. We look at a family tree of yourself and you can, for the most part, tell where another person that you have meet would fall. This process is much more complex than I gave it credit for, but that is essentially what happens. However this so called "family tree" would have to go back hundreds of generations of you, so it is not practical for the average person to do. This chapter reverts back only to the first Big Idea of biology that states: The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. This is a very evolution heavy chapter and essentially this Big Idea relates to the chapter because Shubin keeps going back to the point that we have all descended from a common ancestor and thus these evolutionary links can be establish between us and other races. An essential question to take from this chapter would be: "How can characteristics from other species tell us more about our own bodies?"