I read 'Your Inner Fish' when it came out a few years ago, and I was deeply impressed. Shubin is a good writer and an excellent scientist with the rare gift of being able to explain complicated ideas succinctly. The excellent material in that book (the roots of human anatomy in much earlier organisms), combined with the great writing, made for a fascinating read.
I had pretty high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, like much popular science, it is more biography than science. I know publishers believe that the ordinary person is more interested in people than cold, hard facts, but I'm sure this isn't the case.
The theme of 'The Universe Within' is that within every human life is a history stretching back to the beginning of the cosmos. This is conveyed incredibly well in the earlier chapters, when we're dealing with the origins of the universe itself and of the matter that constitutes everything that exists. Each of the atoms in the human body has a truly ancient and diverse history - iron, for instance, produced within the hearts of stars and fired out through supernovae. We get a few choice facts, like the fact that Jupiter's mass played a huge role in determining the mass of the earth and, consequently, its inhabitants. This part is exceptionally good science writing, and it seems to suggest that what we'll get in the rest of the book is a chronological account of how these atoms came together to become the things we know and love.
No such luck. Once the earth has formed, we get a few mini-biographies of the scientists who conducted research on the composition of the earth (almost inadvertently referring to their research), and then biographies of biologists who resolved some problems in biogeography, and then a few more biographies of specialists on human evolution. No subject thereafter is introduced without a biography, and so instead of seeing the world as made up of ever-more-complex structures resulting from the properties of the universe - which could have been a really breath-taking thing to recount - we see it couched within human lives. This makes it readable but, frankly, not of very lasting interest.
It is also much more superficial as it goes along, presumably because of the space taken up by biography. Shubin takes us up to the rise of 'civilisation' in the form of Natufian sedentism and agriculture in the early Holocene (introduced, of course, by a short biography of Dorothy Garrod), but this discussion is short, fails to explain why such things arose, and so on. I appreciate that this section of the book is beyond Shubin's expertise as a paleontologist, but why not choose an earlier stopping point in the Pleistocene?
The flaws in this book are probably due more to the publisher than the author and, as a whole, it is well-written and clear. Its first few chapters are incredibly interesting and worthwhile. It just promised so much more.
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