"Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" (Neil Shubin)
Unless you are a Huckabee supporter - then hiccups are punishment from G-d for some transgression or another. Probably something that Jared did
Even before they are born, all people carry genetic baggage, genes that were useful to distant, non-human ancestors but are hopelessly outdated, even harmful, to humans as they live today.
Chicago scientist Neil Shubin calls this inheritance our "inner fish."
People hiccup, he explains, because of a design malfunction in a nervous system and breathing apparatus passed down from fish and tadpoles. Human males are vulnerable to hernias because of their awkward setup for toting around sperm-producing gonads, which developed in fish.
[Click to read the rest of Blame 'inner fish' for bad body -- chicagotribune.com]
"In a perfectly designed world -- one with no history -- we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer," Shubin writes in his new book, "Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body."
A dean at the University of Chicago and provost of the Field Museum, Shubin is part of a pioneering field that uses traditional paleontology and molecular biology to study evolution. At 47 he is already something of a science celebrity for helping discover what may be one of history's most important fossils: a "missing link" from the time animals first crawled out of the sea 370 million years ago.
