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

Lents, Nathan H.

ISBN 10: 1328974693 / ISBN 13: 9781328974693

Verlag: Mariner Books, 2018

Missing dust jacket; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers G1328974693I4N01

Inhaltsangabe:

An illuminating, entertaining tour of the physical imperfections that make us human

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 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 long evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor:

NATHAN H. LENTS is a professor of biology at John Jay College at CUNY and is the author of Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals. He has appeared as a scientific expert in national media, including The Today Show, NPR, Access Hollywood, 48 Hours,and Al Jazeera America.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, ...
Verlag: Mariner Books
Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Very Good
Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Jacket