Your Inner Fish Revisited: New Insights into Our Fishy Past

Every organ, cell, and gene preserves traces of life’s long evolutionary journey, from ancient fish that first ventured onto land to primates that ultimately gave rise to humans. In this lecture, Neil Shubin, evolutionary biologist and author of the widely acclaimed national bestseller Your Inner Fish (Vintage, 2009) will explore the deep history embedded within the human body. Drawing on fossil discoveries, comparative anatomy, and modern DNA technologies, he will explain how major evolutionary transitions occur and what they reveal about our place in nature. This talk offers an account of how chance events, evolutionary innovation, and adaptation over billions of years have shaped the human form and linked to all other life on Earth.

Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, in collaboration with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Supported by the Herman and Joan Suit Lecture Fund.