Your Inner Fish Part 2, on PBS Tonight

Don't forget to watch part 2 of Your Inner Fish, on PBS tonight at 10:00.  The first episode was very good and is a great companion to the book.

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.

Rereading Neil Shubin: Buildings and Heads

I am rereading Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish. Why in the Wide World of Sports am I doing this when I have a gazillion other books to read, I will never know but...this time around I was struck by his building analogy to the cranial nerves of the head:

I am reminded of my first days here in Chicago in 2001. I had been given space for a research laboratory in a hundred-year-old building and the lab needed new utility cables, plumbing, and air handling. I remember the day when the contractors first opened the walls to get access to the innards of the building. Their reaction to the plumbing and wiring inside my wall was almost exactly like mine when I opened the human head and saw the trigeminal and facial nerves for the first time. The wires, cables, and pipes inside the wall were a jumble. Nobody in his right mind would have designed a building from scratch this way, with cables and pipes taking bizarre loops and turns throughout the building.

And that is exactly the point. My building was constructed in 1896, and the utilities reflect an old design that has been jury-rigged further with each renovation. If you want to understand the wiring and plumbing in my building, you have to understand its history, how it was renovated for each new generation of scientists. My head has a long history also, and that history explains complicated nerves like the trigeminal and the facial.¹

I reread the passage and thought of the progressive creationist' position. Sure, it is possible that God intentionally and by divine fiat created the trigeminal and facial pathways like that, along with a whole host of other oddities that are present in not just the human body but in all sorts of different animals (not to mention the shared viral DNA). Anything is possible but given that you can see how these things develop, why make the extra logical leaps necessary to explain them as "quirks of the creator" when there is a perfectly good explanation for them lying around in the form of evolutionary theory, unless you really really don't like evolution?

¹Shubin, Neil (2008) Your Inner Fish. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 85-86.
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