Free 2026 John M. Prather Lecture: Your Inner Fish Revisited: New Insights into Our Fishy Past

Name: Free 2026 John M. Prather Lecture: Your Inner Fish Revisited: New Insights into Our Fishy Past
Start: 2026-04-15T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-04-15T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Science Center, Hall D, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Schedule

Wed Apr 15 2026 at 06:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Science Center, Hall D, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 | Cambridge, MA

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, Robert. R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, The University of Chicago; President-Elect, National Academy of Sciences, evolutionary biologist and author of the widely acclaimed national bestseller Your Inner Fish (Vintage, 2009) will explore 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.
Advance registration is recommended:
https://tinyurl.com/PratherYourInnerFish
Presented in collaboration with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard, and 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.