Author Description

We humans prefer to think of ourselves as highly developed animals. But if humans are really evolution's finest invention, why do we have such awful knees? Why do people develop head colds so regularly-two hundred times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists contain so many useless bones? Why is the overwhelming majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really expected to swallow and breathe via the same small tube? Surely there's been some sort of mistake? As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents argues in Human Errors, our evolutionary past is certainly nothing if not a litany of blunders, each more fascinating and informative than the last. The human body is one giant pile of compromises. But it is also a monument to our greatness: as Lents illustrates, we have so many design defects precisely because we are very, very skilled at getting past them. A raucous, profoundly educational tour of humans' four-billion-year-and-counting evolutionary tale, Human Errors simultaneously celebrates our defects and gives an unusual assessment of the cost of our achievement.