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Inquiring Minds

29 Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish

Inquiring Minds

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4848 Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2014

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We all know the Darwin fish, the clever car-bumper parody of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har.But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in the oceans, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.Sure enough, in 2006, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin this week’s episode, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal.""It has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. It's quite the missing link.On the show this week, we talk to Shubin about Tiktaalik, his bestselling book about the discovery, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body, and the recently premiered three-part PBS series adaptation of the book, featuring Shubin as host who romps from Pennsylvania roadsides to the melting Arctic in search of fossils that elucidate the natural history of our own anatomy.This episode also features a discussion of the growing possibility of an El Nino developing later this year, and the bizarre viral myth about animals fleeing Yellowstone Park because of an impending supervolcano eruption.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0

It's Friday, April 11th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

0:05.8

I'm Chris Mooney.

0:06.8

And I'm Injay Viscontas.

0:08.2

Each week we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

0:14.1

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

0:18.0

You can find us on Twitter at Inquiring Show, on Facebook at slash

0:23.1

Inquiring Minds podcast, and you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other podcasting app.

0:35.2

I also want to add that this episode of Inquiring Minds is sponsored by the International Rescue Committee,

0:41.3

and this is a great organization that is leading the way from harm to home for millions of people

0:46.3

who are uprooted and threatened by conflict, disaster, and persecution around the world,

0:51.5

so you can learn more about the IRC's life-saving programs in the

0:55.5

U.S. in 40 countries at rescue.org.

0:59.5

So this week for the show, I interviewed Neil Schuban.

1:03.3

He's a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and one of the discoverers of Ticktolic,

1:08.9

this amazing creature that lived 375 million years ago and clearly

1:13.9

marks a transitional phase between a fish that lived in the water and later animals like

1:20.5

us that would live exclusively on land. And Shubin is also the author of the best-selling book

1:26.5

Your Inner Fish, which uses this discovery

1:29.6

and other insights to show just how much our bodies reflect our evolutionary relationship,

1:35.0

not just with fellow apes, not just with fellow mammals, but indeed with fish. And your inner

1:40.3

fish has just been adapted into a three-part series by PBS, whose first part just

1:45.3

aired. So I invited Schuban on the show to talk about why our bodies themselves are in effect

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