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UW and Your Inner Fish
April 9, 2014 Leave a Comment
The new three-part series Your Inner Fish premieres tonight following all-new episodes of Nature and NOVA, and the series has strong connections to the University of Wisconsin. The executive in charge of the project is Sean B. Carroll, Allan Wilson Professor of molecular biology, genetics and molecular genetics at UW-Madison.
Additionally, John Hawks, associate professor of anthropology at UW-Madison, was an advisor to the series and UW-Madison graduate, Laura Helft, is a senior researcher at Tangled Bank Studios, the production company behind the series.
In a UW-Madison article, which details Carroll’s involvement in the series, Carroll discusses the series saying, “There is a lot of discovery there, in the context of essentially how our bodies have modified over the years from our fishy ancestors.” Tonight’s episode, for example, traces the ancestry of our own hands and arms back to the fins of Tiktaalik, a primeval fish that crawled onto land.
University Place, Wisconsin Public Television’s lecture series, has recorded episodes with the other scientists involved with Your Inner Fish. In 2010, John Hawks talked on the existence of the Neanderthal during the course of human evolution. And in a 2011 lecture, then Ph.D. candidate Laura Helft gave a whirlwind tour of plant pathology called “When Microbes Attack, Plants Fight Back.”
The thought-provoking night of TV begins at 7 with all-new episodes of Nature and NOVA followed by the premiere of Your Inner Fish. If you need more reason to tune in tonight, I give you Chris P. Bacon, part of Nature “My Bionic Pet.”
