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Hiccups? Hernia? Hemorrhoids?

Blame your inner fish. Your IF may be giving you cancer, too. ChiTrib: 

Even before they are born, all people carry genetic baggage, genes that were useful to distant, non-human ancestors but are hopelessly outdated, even harmful, to humans as they live today.

Chicago scientist Neil Shubin calls this inheritance our “inner fish.”

People hiccup, he explains, because of a design malfunction in a nervous system and breathing apparatus passed down from fish and tadpoles. Human males are vulnerable to hernias because of their awkward setup for toting around sperm-producing gonads, which developed in fish.

“In a perfectly designed world — one with no history — we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer,” Shubin writes in his new book, “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”

A dean at the University of Chicago and provost of the Field Museum, Shubin is part of a pioneering field that uses traditional paleontology and molecular biology to study evolution. At 47 he is already something of a science celebrity for helping discover what may be one of history’s most important fossils: a “missing link” from the time animals first crawled out of the sea 370 million years ago.

The book may make him even more famous. Pantheon Books seems to have high hopes for “Your Inner Fish,” with an announced first printing of 50,000 books, a coast-to-coast author tour and foreign publication rights sold to 13 nations so far. It even placed Shubin on the red-hot “Colbert Report,” comedian Stephen Colbert’s television show, the night before the book’s Jan. 15 release.

While religious creationists doubt evolutionary theory and abhor the suggestion that humans are descended from apes, “Your Inner Fish” traces human evolution far beyond early primates.

“I wanted to tell the story of the human body from the really deep, ancient stuff — fish, worms, jellyfish, sponges and those sorts of simpler, more primitive life forms,” Shubin said recently as he showed off his genetic laboratory on the U. of C. campus.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Topics: human organs, prehistory, science

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:53 pm on Wednesday, February 20, 2008

4 Responses to “Hiccups? Hernia? Hemorrhoids?”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   February 20th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

   Hm. I’ve got some major bones to pick with my inner fish, then.

2. Jamie Irons Says:
   February 21st, 2008 at 9:17 am

   Jules,

   Typo in the title…should be “hemorrhoids”…

   Jamie Irons

   Physician and spelling maven

3. Jamie Irons Says:
   February 21st, 2008 at 9:27 am

   By the way, the late Stephen Jay Gould made arguments similar to Shubin’s very forcefully beginning in the 1970s…

   See, for example, “The Panda’s Thumb”.

   Jamie Irons

4. Jules Crittenden Says:
   February 21st, 2008 at 9:58 am

   Thank you, Dr Irons. I should know that. Never mind why. Frikkin fish. Re the basic argument, I don’t know why anyone would be surprised. Unless its someone who believes we sprung whole from mud on Ussher’s timeline.

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