Busy around the house yesterday, we were listening to CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” science show, and I was delighted to hear the engaging Dr. Neil Shubin (whom I quoted here*, from Natalie Angier’s recent book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science). You can listen to the interview here.
Dr. Shubin, who’s also provost at Chicago’s Field Museum, was discussing his new book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon, January 2008); if you go to the previous Amazon link, you’ll find some photographs from Dr. Shubin’s research expedition and a brief review of the book by Oliver Sacks, who calls it “my favorite sort of book — an intelligent, exhilarating, and compelling scientific adventure story, one which will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.”
More on the book here:
University of Chicago Chronicle
Review from The Guardian (note the much funkier UK cover)
* From The Canon:
“When I look back on the science I had in high school, I remember it being taught as a body of facts and laws you had to memorize,” said Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. “The Krebs cycle, Linnaean classifications. Not only does this approach whip the joy of doing science right out of most people, but it gives everyone a distorted view of what science is. Science is not a rigid body of facts. It is a dynamic process of discovery. It is as alive as life itself.”
Filed under: Biology, Books, Evolution, Natural History, Science
We love Q&Q but usually forget that it is on. Must make a better effort.
Thanks for the tip on the book. Sounds interesting.
JoVE, I suppose the podcasts are an option, too.