Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body - Neil Shubin

Every living thing on the planet had parents. This is a law of biology so fundamental that it's usually taken for granted, but it holds the key to the phenomenon known as descent with modifications, which is the mechanism of evolution. This process leaves signatures of ancestral features in the descending organisms, and so we can learn about our own bodies from studying the whole "tree of life": the way our body is constructed and the way it works; how a complete individual with lungs and heart, skull and feet, ears and eyes is assembled from the initial clump of cells. With incredible breadth but not getting bogged down in detail, ...  Read the complete review