A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
Ratings5
Average rating4.3
"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"--
Reviews with the most likes.
The book was quite lighthearted and non-exhaustive, which can sometimes make some of the theories oversimplified and shallow. However, it does a good job of keeping the reader's attention. The topic of this book is quite interesting, and just like the author has said, while many books sing praises to the greatness of the human body, this book discusses something that shows a more pragmatic nature of evolution (similar to ‘The Blind Watchmaker' by Richard Dawkins, but with more information on designing faults). I do think the first chapter, ‘Pointless Bones and Anatomical Errors,' could have been more elaborated upon. I also liked how the author discussed our cognitive biases as a bug in our system in Chapter 6, ‘A Species of Suckers.' I'm not sure if the long epilogue added much to the book, but it seems alright.
4 stars out of 5.
The book was incredibly informative, and yet it remained humerus (haha, get it?) all the way through. Really enjoyed learning about the human body in relation to evolution and why certain defects developed (seriously, our knees suck, and the book explained why and how that happened!)