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Human Errors
A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
1 of 1 copy available
We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often—two hundred times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake?
As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is indeed nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last. The human body is one big pile of compromises. But that is also a testament to our greatness: as Lents shows, humans have so many design flaws precisely because we are very, very good at getting around them. A rollicking, deeply informative tour of humans' four-billion-year-and-counting evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.
"An insightful and entertaining romp through the myriad ways in which the human body falls short of an engineering ideal—and the often-surprising reasons why." —Ian Tattersall, author of The Monkey in the Mirror
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 19, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781328974679
- File size: 6829 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781328974679
- File size: 7895 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 15, 2018
Natural selection made us what we are today, and that is deeply flawed. So argues Lents (Biology/John Jay Coll., CUNY; Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals, 2016) in his second book.The problem is that selection happens through random mutations, which are rarely useful. When good, the bearer may leave more offspring and spread the change to future generations. So over millions of years of evolution, our species has been shaped, but not to a state of engineered elegance according to some master plan. By way of demonstration, Lents lists some of our serious defects: The retinas of our eyes face backward so that light has to pass through nerve fibers to reach the photoreceptors. Gravity (from bipedalism) strains the knee's delicate ligament structure. We suffer more colds than other species because of the poor design of the mucus drainage system to our sinuses. The author goes on to review defects in the human genome itself and in major systems: An overactive immune system can result in autoimmune disease and allergies. Regarding reproduction, the hazards to successful conception and childbirth are such that it is a wonder the species has survived. At points in the text, Lents explores cultural evolution, such as the formation of pair bonds and the division of labor, as well as the fixes that science has developed to fight some of our flaws. These aspects are further developed in the final chapters, as the author describes foibles of the brain, including false memory, optical illusions, and various forms of bias and illogical thinking. He goes on to ponder the fate of the species, growing ever more speculative: Maybe stem cells, gene editing, and other miracles of medicine will render us immortal, and maybe we can move to other planets. Or maybe we will implode, since we are already overpopulated and prone to violence and destruction of the environment.The author's offbeat view of human evolution makes for lively reading and invites readers to think deeply about some of his wilder conjectures.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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