Pierre Corvol is Professor in the Chair of Experimental Medicine at the Collège de France. His work centres on endocrine regulations of blood pressure and hypertension. He is most notably the author, with Nicolas Postel-Vinay, of Le Retour du Docteur Knock and L’Arbre vasculaire.
Jean-Luc Elghozi is a nephrologist physician working at Hospital Necker, in Paris, and a professor of pharmacology at the University of Paris-V. He specialises in the regulation of blood pressure and the sympathetic nervous system.


Having originated in the oceans, land vertebrae have never completely relinquished the watery medium. The human embryo develops in a pocket of amniotic liquid, our bodies consist of nearly 95 % water at birth and 60 % in adulthood: these figures remind us of our marine origins.
The passage from aquatic to land life, the act of crawling out of the water, is the result of a long evolutionary process, made up of progressive adaptations to the initially hostile conditions of the new environment. A collective work, written by a number of experts — biologists, physiologists, physicians and philosophers — this book covers various aspects of an amazing adventure that may well not be completely over yet.
This is an illuminating, multi-facetted study of a fascinating question in human evolution.