Your Inner Fish Revisited: New Insights into Our Fishy Past

2026 John M. Prather Lecture Series Speaker: Neil Shubin, Robert. R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, The University of Chicago; President-Elect, National Academy of Sciences 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) explores 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 us 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. John McClellan Prather (1864–1938) was a zoologist and educator who primarily taught science at the high school level. He was born in Felicity, Ohio, on September 8, 1864 and earned an A. degree from Antioch College in Ohio in 1891. He then earned an AB degree at Harvard in 1894 and an AM at Harvard in 1896. About the Speaker Neil H. Shubin is a renowned evolutionary biologist, educator, author, and science communicator. He has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago as well as senior leadership positions at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and the Field Museum in Chicago. He has led fossil-hunting expeditions around the world including to Ellesmere Island in Nunavut territory, the northernmost region of Canada, where his multidisciplinary team made a breakthrough discovery in 2004—a fossil representing an intermediate body plan between fish and amphibians. In collaboration with local leaders, the fossilized animal was named Tiktaalik—“large freshwater fish” in Inuktitut. In 2008, Shubin published Your Inner Fish, a national bestseller that received the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences as the best science book of the year. Currently, at The University of Chicago, he leads a dynamic molecular biology and paleontology research laboratory where researchers experiment with embryos from sharks, paddlefish, and other species. Shubin holds numerous distinctions and honors, including receiving the Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer Award (2019) and the Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize (2024). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and is currently its President-Elect; he will begin his term on June 30, 2026. Shubin holds a BA in biology from Columbia College of Columbia University and a PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University.