
"An illuminating, entertaining tour of the physical imperfections--from faulty knees to junk DNA--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 havesuch 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 throughthe 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. Thehuman 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"-- Provided by publisher.
Publisher:
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
ISBN:
9781328974693
1328974693
1328974693
Call Number:
612.0000
Characteristics:
pages cm
Subjects:
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Biology / General.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Human Anatomy & Physiology.
Human evolution.
Human physiology.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Human Anatomy & Physiology.
Human evolution.
Human physiology.



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