Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Your Inner Fish Coming to a TV Set Near You

PBS has hopped on the bandwagon that Cosmos is on and is airing a miniseries based on Neil Shubin's great book Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. John Easton of the University of Chicago News writes:
The three-part series, which premieres nationwide April 9, brings to life Shubin’s best-selling and highly readable 2008 book, Your Inner Fish. Chicago’s dramatic scenery is a star of the show, as are the UChicago classrooms and laboratories in which Shubin explains anatomical links between seemingly disparate relatives, including the brains of humans and sharks.

The episodes, made possible by a partnership between Shubin, Tangled Bank Productions of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Public Broadcasting Service, also follow Shubin and fossil-hunting colleagues on expeditions to the Arctic, the deserts of Ethiopia and the high plains of South Africa.
This looks very promising. I read Shubin's book and it is both informative and humorous (I laughed for ten minutes at the example of the generation of full bozos.)  If the series lives up to the book, it is something I will have my kids watch with me. Hopefully, unlike Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey—which spares no expense at pointing out how “primitive” religion is—the Neil Shubin series will be more philosophically neutral.

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