Neil Shubin Your Inner Fish Analysis

In class today we watched the video, “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin. This video was about the evolution of humans and I found many points that were made throughout this video very interesting. One of the facts that I found most interesting was about fish. Although we have been studying fish this semester along with the other groups of animals, the “road map” that they provided of the different time zones of animals and how they evolved into each other helped me to further understand the sequence in which they came in. It also helped me to understand the fact that we have all evolved from fish. By using diagrams and images, this video also explained the similarities that humans and fish have. The majority of our skeletal system has derived from fish and we also share a common organization of nerves in the brain. However, as a result of the fact that fish have fins in order for them to swim, the structure of our hands, feet, arms and legs to not come from fish. During the course of the video we were shown the process of discovering where we have adapted these characteristics from. …show more content…
This is because, although I am not a scientist, I am not sure that I would have had the realization of where we had gotten our hand, foot, arm, and leg structures from. I assumed that these characteristics came from the first amphibians and before now I had never wondered where amphibians adapted these traits from. The type of animal that these qualities derived from was a transitional fish. This fish had hand like limbs in the front of its body in order to propel its self out of the water and onto the land, and the fins on the back of this animal kept it from toppling over when on land and helped it swim while in water. The video informed me that this animal was a member of the “Stega” family, a family of animals that have played a huge part in the study of evolution our