I'm really excited to share my other favorite book, which maybe you never heard about it but I'm pretty sure when you start reading it you can't stop.The
name of the book was different and kind of attractive " your inner fish", the more you read, it
gets more and more clear.
The first chapter’s introduction to the book was very
amazing to me. When he describes his journey and how they ended up with
Canadian Arctic to find evidence of how the fish species became land animals, I
was really surprised at the effort put into looking for fossils to determine
the growth of species. The discovery of tiktaalik, the transitional fossil,
which is intermediate between fish and amphibians, was the most interesting
part. So far in this book I learned about myself and about our histories and
origin. The reflection of this chapter was that we and the animals around us
are from one ancestors which soon evolved into another and another making
branches and leaves wherever needed improvement just like in Darwin's natural
selection.
Chapter two was kind of hard to
understand, but it was a truly fascinating chapter. Having the same kind of
limbs as other animals like birds, lizards, penguins, and seals it was
interesting, But when the book started to talk about fishes, I was confused.
Because it made sense that mammals and lizards can have similar limbs, but
having similar limbs as fishes are just confusing also interesting. After
reading chapter two, it helped me realize the importance of all the parts in
the human body. Now that I understand how hard would be to do your everyday
tasks without hands, I’m more appreciate. Also other parts in the body that are
equally important to the hands or even more important, but as Shubin explains it
"The answer must, at some level, be that the hand is a visible connection
between us; it is a signature for who we are and what we can
attain"(pg.29). I learned that some fishes have lungs. Once again
tiktaalik amazed me when shubin and his team by removing his fins, discovered
that it has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist similar to human arm. Another
surprising fact about Tiktaalik was that they also find out it is capable of
doing push-ups. It is really interesting to think of fishes as our ancestors.
What was interesting in chapter three,
was finding out that our body is made up of hundreds of different kinds of
cells that give each of us our distinctive shapes. The most exciting experiment
was on chicken and shark using ZPA and Sonic Hedgehog to
create the mirror image of chicken’s wing and shark’s fin. It’s also
interesting that a small, microscopic piece of ZPA have a huge influence on the
shape of our hand. Also I learned that the skeletal structure of shark’s
appendages is not similar to Owen’s theory "one bone-two bone-lotsa
blobs-digits pattern." As you go further in the book you’ll find out how
he makes the information interesting, and how he explained everything by
showing pictures and helps us more to see what he was talking about. I really
enjoyed this chapter; I hope that there are more to come about fossils. Every
time I read a chapter of this book, I feel like I learn something new about
myself.