Your Inner Fish - Essay Sample

Introduction

It has come to be accepted that the ancestor of living vertebrates is a tiny fish, called Metaspriggina. It's a soft-bodied fish that is stunningly preserved and it's over five million years old. The tiny fish contains sports featured gills which are explained by biologists to have transformed into jawbones, which is a common characteristic in all jawed vertebrates. This observation is explained further by the serial homology hypothesis theory, which attempts in explaining the emergence of jawed vertebrates (Shubin). Many scientists before this theory, explained the ancestry of all vertebrates to be boneless, eyeless, and jawless fish which is wrong compared to the theory of serial homology hypothesis.

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According to Shubin, hands, arms and wrists can be traced from fish which evolved to amphibians, then the mammals and finally to the human beings. Neil Shubin in the episode "Your Inner Fish", he cites an anatomist Richard Owen who dictated that the common plan for limbs was one to two bones, fingers, and little blobs. As a result, the arms of human beings are described by the video to have projected from the shoulder to the fingers. According to the episode "Your Inner Reptile", Shubin together with other scientists and researchers, show that we, human beings, inherited skin of reptiles when they left the water (Shubin). It is evidenced also that hair was used by the reptiles to stay warm which is a common feature in human beings. The way humans walk was inherited from the monkey which is a feature that is addressed in the episode "Your Inner Monkey" by Shubin. This was proven by the fossils which were discovered by Lucy.

In the first episode of inner fish, mutations prove how the DNA sequence of the fish was changed slowly by slowly from the fish until a human was formed. According to Shubin, the mutations can be either benefiting or lethal to the organisms undergoing the process. However, for humans, mutations have been beneficial as they allow for survival. Regarding reptiles, we inherited the gene EDA from the reptiles which controlled the number of teeth usually possessed by humans and their appearance. Different teeth shapes tell a lot about an organism and hence the shape and number that was acquired by the human teeth is proof that human share the EDA gene with reptiles. The gene responsible for colour vision is affected due to the Inner monkey that we have, according to Shubin. The recessive gene in monkey is the one responsible for colour blindness in most humans. As a result, this DNA evidence proves that we inherited most characteristics from our ancestral origins, fish, reptiles and monkeys.

What I found most interesting from the first episode of Shubin is the disadvantages of mutations. As much as they bring surviving abilities to human, they are the sole cause of many cancer cases today. In the second episode, the most interesting item I viewed was the inheritance of the brains of human beings from mammals. However, Shubin could have elaborated more on the brain differences when it comes to size. In the last episode, "Your Inner Monkey", the concept of colour blindness is explained to have originated from monkey due to the genetic sharing that occurred several million years ago (Shubin). Due to the explanation, am now able to understand how my colour blindness issue surfaced.

Conclusion

The three episodes presented by Shubin are very vital in the understanding of the origins of all vertebrates. The three videos support that human beings inherited several features from reptiles, fish and monkeys. However, the ancestry of human beings traces back to the fish, which can be seen to have undergone several mutations to form the jawbones, which as mentioned earlier, is the key characteristic that is present in all vertebrates. Therefore, the videos convinced me that the theory of serial homology hypothesis is true.

Works Cited

Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish: The Series. 2018. https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/your-inner-fish-series. December 2018.