Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

by Nathan H Lents

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Book cover for Human Errors

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"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? 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 nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last. The human body, perhaps evolution's greatest creation, 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-long evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success"--
  • ISBN10 1328974693
  • ISBN13 9781328974693
  • Publish Date 1 May 2018
  • Publish Status Out of Stock
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Mariner Books
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 256
  • Language English