To Neil H. Shubin’s long résumé — paleontologist, molecular biologist, dean and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, best-selling author — can now be added “television host.” Dr. Shubin, 53, who helped discover the 375-million-year-old fish called Tiktaalik, hailed as a missing link between sea and land animals, will preside over “Your Inner Fish,” a three-part series on evolution (based on his book of the same title) that makes its debut Wednesday on PBS.

We spoke in Chicago in February and in New York last month. What follows is an edited and condensed version of the conversations.

Q. Where did you grow up?

A. Suburban Philadelphia. My mom’s a retired nursing home administrator. My father, Seymour Shubin, is a fiction writer. He writes mysteries. My favorite is “The Captain”; it won an Edgar award. He’s an educated man, but science kind of scares him. So when I’m writing, my dad is my target audience. Whenever I hit a tricky scientific concept, I think, “How would I communicate this to him?” This is why my books are written, intentionally, without jargon, which can lead to some gyrations because jargon does have precision. The funny thing is, I’m not sure he always gets what I do. When I first started working on the book version of “Your Inner Fish,” he asked, “Neil, how did you become a scientist?” I thought, “All these years he’s seen me run off to the Arctic, but he’s never been quite sure what I do up there.”

So let me ask you his question: How did you become a paleontologist?

I was one of those kids with lots of hobbies: astronomy, dinosaurs, collecting rocks, collecting stamps. It all came together when I went to college in New York — Columbia — and volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History.