Dinosaurs are a pretty recent phenomenon-people only started to study the Terrible Lizards about a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s one of those things that makes you wonder. DaVinci was intrigued by fossils and was one of the first people to ask why seashells were hanging out on mountaintops. The locical explantion at the time was that this was evidecne of The Great Flood.
Once the idea of Devine Design was put to rest, the real science of Dinosuars and all the other odds and ends laying around in the fossil record took on new meanings. With the advent of Darwin’s Natural Selection and the oft miligned Evolution there was a natural desire to find The Missing Link. Turns out there are rather a lot of missing links to find. One of the more interesting of these links was the spot between fish and land animals. It also seemed that this would be a relatively easy one to find. The fossil record has a spot with fish and no mammals, and then a spot with fish and land mammals, look in between the two.
A group of palentoligists did just that a few years ago and discovered an animal that is, to all appearances, half fish and half mammal. The story of that discovery is covered in the book Your Inner Fish. It is a story of innerconectedness and how everything that have every lived on Earth is related to everything else that ever lived on Earth.
If you are fan of the Creator theory, then this all works out fine, as everything is made from the same blueprint-someone still needed to draw those blueprints, right? If you are not a fan of the Creator idea, then all these small steps along the way prove that the design changed over millions of years and that we are what we are through those changes. We call that evolution.
These are big ideas, big thoughts. It wasn’t until the 1800s that anyone seriously tried to answer some of these ages old questions. We still don’t have all the answers, and may well never have all the answers. If a fish that looks like an alligator was a stunning development in evolution 285 millions years ago, why are there still alligators around today? We live in an age of built in obsolescence and the idea that there is room for everyone seems totally counter intuitive to the whole idea of survival of the fittest.
But it makes sense, a place for everything and everything in its place. Life on earth would really suck if people had to do the serious work of pollinating flowers and breaking down leaves into topsoil.
I like science books and occasionally dip my toe into the deep end with some Number theory, String theory or some other off the wall topic. But more often than not, these books are less enlightening and more baffling. Oh I can read most of the words well enough and even understand the occasional sentence, but the overall ideas being discussed often leave me lost.
Not so with Your Inner Fish. The topic is large and complex one, the history of the human body and life on planet Earth, but the topic is treated with a light touch. The large words balanced with small ones, the names of ancient animals balances with the idea that they look like a hamburger. Childish names for things are often used in place of polysyllabic ones. This is a nice change.
Your Inner Fish is still a pretty deep book, there is a ton of science in here and some of it gets hard to swallow even as it is being spoon fed. But it is dead fascinating stuff. Like all animals with arms have the same basic design and the stuff doing the work is pretty much the same in all embryos of all species that have arms and legs. There is something pretty amazing about the fact that we are so much like everything else on earth. We are just an animal-albeit one with a big honking brain.
This is fun stuff, really-kind of a cross between Nova and Beakman’s World.
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