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Human errors : a panorama of our glitches, from pointless bones to broken genes / Nathan H. Lents.

by Lents, Nathan H.

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Human physiology.

Human evolution.

9781328974693 (hc.)

xiii, 233 p. : ill., map ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-222) and index.

Introduction: behold the blunders of nature -- Pointless bones and other anatomical errors -- Our needy diet -- Junk in the genome -- Homo sterilis -- Why God invented doctors -- A species of suckers -- Epilogue: the future of humanity.

"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."--From publisher.

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