Human Errors

We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved. But if we are evolution's greatest creation, why are we so badly designed? We have retinas that face backward, we must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves and millions of us can't reproduce successfully without help from modern science. And that's just the beginning of the story. Biologist Nathan H. Lents takes us on an entertaining and illuminating tour of our four-billion-year-long evolutionary saga, and shows us how each of our flaws tells us a story about our species' history.

“An insightful and entertaining romp through the myriad ways in which the human body falls short of an engineering ideal - and the often surprising reasons why”

HUMAN ERRORS is outstanding, scholarly yet entertaining. Perhaps inadvertently, this funny book argues that if there is an intelligent designer, he is comically hopeless

An entertaining and enlightening guide to human imperfections - FINANCIAL TIMES

Spry, plausible, free from jargon . . . the most enjoyable anatomical study since Jonathan Miller's The Body in Question - THE TIMES

Chatty and humorous . . . After reading Human Errors, nobody will see their body in the same way again - DAILY EXPRESS

Nathan H. Lents is a professor of biology at John Jay College at The City University of New York. He is the author of Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals.

@nathanlents

We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved. But if we are evolution's greatest creation, why are we so badly designed? We have retinas that face backward, we must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves and millions of us can't reproduce successfully without help from modern science. And that's just the beginning of the story. Biologist Nathan H. Lents takes us on an entertaining and illuminating tour of our four-billion-year-long evolutionary saga, and shows us how each of our flaws tells us a story about our species' history.

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