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Nathan H. Lents

Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes Hardcover – May 1, 2018

by Nathan H. Lents (Author)

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A biology professor’s illuminating tour of the physical imperfections―from faulty knees to junk DNA―that make us human. ¶“A funny, fascinating catalog of our collective shortcomings that’s tough to put down.”―Discover ¶ 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 indeed 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-and-counting evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

May 1, 2018
Dimensions

6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1328974693
ISBN-13

978-1328974693
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Review

"A funny, fascinating catalog of our collective shortcomings that’s tough to put down." —Discover "An entertaining and enlightening guide to human imperfections." —Financial Times "The author's offbeat view of human evolution makes for lively reading and invites readers to think deeply." —Kirkus Reviews "Wildly entertaining." —Bustle.com "Nobody will see their body in the same way again." —Daily Express "In Human Errors, Nathan Lents explores our biological imperfections with style, wit, and life-affirming insight. You'll finish it with new appreciation for those human failings that, in so many surprising ways, helped shape our remarkable species." —Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author of The Poisoner's Handbook "A fantastic voyage through the human body" —The Australian "Anybody with a slipped disk knows humans are not very intelligently designed, but most of us are unaware of the extent of our imperfections. Nathan Lents fills in the gaps in Human Errors, 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." —Ian Tattersall, author of Masters of the Planet and The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution “Anyone who has aged without perfect grace can attest to the laundry list of imperfections so thoroughly and engagingly considered by Nathan Lents in Human Errors. This is the best book I’ve read on how poorly designed our bodies are. I learned something new on every page." —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and New York Times best-selling author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain “Human Errors is outstanding, scholarly yet entertaining. Perhaps inadvertently, this funny book argues that if there is an intelligent designer, he is comically hopeless." —Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived “[An] engaging read that places our foibles within a larger evolutionary context.” —Massive Science —

About the Author

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We love to admire physical excellence. We can't get enough of massive bodybuilders, graceful ballerinas, Olympic sprinters, shapely swimsuit models, and hardy decathletes. In addition to its innate beauty, the human body is also dynamic and resilient. The carefully orchestrated functions of the heart, lungs, glands, and GI tract are truly impressive, and we continue to discover the elaborate intricacies through which the body maintains its health despite the onslaught of a changing environment. Any discussion of the shortcomings of our physical form must first begin with an acknowledgment that the beauty and capability of the human body far outshines the few odd quirks here and there.

But quirks there definitely are. Lurking in our anatomy are some odd arrangements, inefficient designs, and even outright defects. Mostly, these are fairly neutral; they don't hinder our ability to live and thrive. If they did, evolution would have handled them by now. But some are not neutral, and each has an interesting tale to tell.

Over millions of generations, human bodies morphed tremendously. Most of our species' various anatomical structures were transformed in that metamorphosis, but a few were left behind and exist now purely as anachronisms, the whispers of days long gone. For instance, the human arm and the bird wing perform totally different functions but have striking structural similarities in the scaffolding of their bones. That's no coincidence. All quadruped vertebrates have the same basic skeletal chassis, modified as much as possible for each animal's unique lifestyle and habitat.

Through the random acts of mutation and the pruning of natural selection, the human body has taken shape, but it's not a perfect process. A close inspection of our mostly beautiful and impressive bodies reveals mistakes that got caught in one of evolution's blind spots'?''?sometimes literally.

I Can't See Clearly Now
The human eye is a good example of how evolution can produce a clunky design that nonetheless results in a well-performing anatomical product. The human eye is indeed a marvel, but if it had been designed from scratch, it's hard to imagine it would look anything like it does now. Inside the human eye is the long legacy of how light-sensing slowly and incrementally developed in the animal lineage.

Before we consider the puzzling physical design of the eye, let me make one thing clear: The human eye is fraught with functional problems as well. For instance, many of the people who are reading this book right now are doing so only with the aid of modern technology. In the United States and Europe, 30 to 40 percent of the population have myopia (nearsightedness) and require assistance from glasses or contact lenses. Without them, their eyes do not focus light properly, and they cannot make out objects that are more than a few feet away. The rate of myopia increases to more than 70 percent of the population in Asian countries. Nearsightedness is not caused by injury. It's a design defect; the eyeball is simply too long. Images focus sharply before they reach the back of the eye and then fall out of focus again by the time they finally land on the retina.

Humans can also be farsighted. There are two separate conditions that cause this, each resulting from a different design flaw. In one, hyperopia, the eyeballs are too short, and the light fails to focus before hitting the retina. This is the anatomical opposite of myopia. The second condition, presbyopia, is age-related farsightedness caused by the progressive loss of flexibility of the lens of the eye, the failure of the muscles to pull on the lens and focus light properly, or both. Presbyopia, which literally translates as 'old-man sight," begins to set in around age forty. By the age of sixty, virtually everyone has difficulty making out close objects. I'm thirty-nine, and I have noticed that I hold books and newspapers farther and farther from my face each year. The time for bifocals is nigh.

Add to these common eye issues others such as glaucoma, cataracts, and retinal detachment (just to name a few), and a pattern begins to emerge. Our species is supposed to be the most highly evolved on the planet, but our eyes are rather lacking. The vast majority of people will suffer significant loss of visual function in their lifetimes, and for many of them, it starts even before puberty.

I got glasses after my first eye exam, when I was in the second grade. Who knows how long I had actually needed them? My vision isn't just a little blurry. It's terrible'?''?somewhere around 20/400. Had I been born before, say, the 1600s, I would probably have gone through life unable to do anything that required me to see farther than arm's length. In prehistory, I would have been worthless as a hunter'?''?or a gatherer, for that matter. It's unclear if and how poor vision affected the reproductive success of our forebears, but the rampant nature of poor vision in modern humans argues that excellent vision was not strictly required to succeed at least in the most recent past. There must have been ways that early humans with poor vision could have thrived.

Human vision is even more pitiable when compared with the excellent vision of most birds, especially birds of prey such as eagles and condors. Their visual acuity at great distances puts even the sharpest human eyes to shame. Many birds can also see a broader range of wavelengths than we can, including ultraviolet light. In fact, migrating birds detect the North and South Poles with their eyes. Some birds literally see the Earth's magnetic field. Many birds also have an additional translucent eyelid that allows them to look directly into the sun at length without damaging their retinas. Any human attempting to do the same would most likely suffer permanent blindness.

And that's just human vision during the day. Human night vision is, at best, only so-so, and for some of us it is very poor. Compare ours with cats', whose night vision is legendary. So sensitive are cats' eyes that they can detect a single photon of light in a completely dark environment. (For reference, in a small, brightly lit room, there are about one hundred billion photons bouncing around at any given moment.) While some photoreceptors in human retinal cells are apparently able to respond to single photons, these receptors cannot overcome background signaling in the eye, which leaves humans functionally incapable of sensing just one photon and thus unable to perform the sorts of visual feats that cats pull off so easily. For a human to achieve conscious perception of the faintest possible flash of light, she needs five or ten photons delivered in rapid succession, so cats' vision is substantially better than humans' in dim conditions. Furthermore, human visual acuity and image resolution in dim light is far worse than that of cats, dogs, birds, and many other animals. You might be able to see more colors than dogs can, but they can see at night more clearly than you.

Speaking of color vision, not all humans have that either. Somewhere around 6 percent of males have some form of colorblindness. (It's not nearly as common in females because the screwed-up genes that lead to colorblindness are almost always recessive and on the X chromosome. Because females have two X chromosomes, they have a backup if they inherit one bum copy.) Around seven billion people live on this planet, so that means that at least a quarter of a billion humans cannot appreciate the same palette of colors that the rest of the species can. That's almost the population of the United States.

These are just the functional problems with the human eye. Its physical design is riddled with all sorts of defects as well. Some of these contribute to the eye's functional problems, while others are benign, if befuddling.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; 1st edition (May 1, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1328974693
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1328974693
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,046,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,716 in Anatomy (Books)
- #3,483 in Evolution (Books)
- #4,685 in Biology (Books)

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Mark B Gerstein

Thoughts on Lents' Human Errors: Fascinating anecdotes on our species' weaknesses

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 12, 2020

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I read Nathan Lents' book Human Errors with great interest. This book goes over a variety of physiological and molecular errors in humans that are somewhat paradoxical: they make us, in a sense, significantly more vulnerable than our immediate animal cousins. In particular, writing this review from the vantage point of mid-2020, I found it fascinating that this book was published in 2018 and cautions us on how vulnerable the human species is to global pandemic.

The book begins by describing examples of physiological oddities, such as our prevalence of knee injuries (i.e., ACL) and our upside-down sinus drainage patterns, which to some degree were caused by our recently upright posture. Next, the book delves into molecular defects, looking at the large amount of supposedly junk DNA and the many pseudogenes in our genome. Lents relates the pseudogenes to vitamin deficiencies such as the pseudogene for the GULO enzyme being associated with vitamin C deficiency. Lents then talks about autoimmune diseases, such as Graves disease and Myasthenia gravis, that we are much more prone to than our immediate animal relatives. The book culminates with a focus on the human brain and how it, too, sometimes suffers in comparison to cognitive set-ups elsewhere in the animal kingdom. For instance, our flicker-fusion threshold is considerably lower than that of dogs and birds, meaning that we are less able to resolve things moving quickly. In addition, we tend to be easily overwhelmed by large amounts of data, despite our belief that we can reason with "big data" well.

Overall, the book is a good read. I have some small quibbles on the discussion of junk DNA, which I think is a bit exaggerated. I believe that much of this DNA does have various uses, albeit somewhat indirect. Nevertheless, Lents' illustration of how evolution doesn't always lead to the optimal endpoint is compelling.

7 people found this helpful

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Timothy Haugh

Excellent Science for Anyone

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 11, 2020

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With Human Errors, Professor Lents has written a user-friendly guide to how natural selection has led to some of the oddities and defects of human physiology. Despite the great success of our species, the human animal has a number of challenges that have to be overcome. The rise of these challenges can be explained through the many changes our bodies have gone through over many millions of years. Some of these changes are from developments that couldn’t be undone when physical structures change (the poor structure of the retina, the insufficiency of the ACL). Some are the results of things that were once positive for us that have since become negative (the gene that causes sickle cell also protects us from malaria). Some are things that were negative but initially compensated for (losing the ability to produce our own vitamin C during a period where humans were primarily living in tropical climates with plenty of citrus fruit). And this is only a brief summary of a handful of Lents’ many excellent examples.

It’s easy to go on for a long while about this well-done book. It is easy for anyone to understand even without a background in biology. Also, though clearly based on Darwin, Professor Lents wisely stays away from discussions of controversy. He presents his examples and, apart from a couple side comments about poor design that will rile the intelligent design crowd, he sticks to the science. This makes for a book that comes across as a real “science for the masses” kind of volume rather than as another weak shot in the culture wars. It is well worth reading.

3 people found this helpful

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Jeongman

We are okay to be wrong!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 3, 2019

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We humans should become less arrogant and less confident about what we believe is right or wrong. We are just a carrier of ATGC configurations. If we understand and accept our fragility, our life should not be so hard any more. We are only a random combination of genes. We have nothing to be proud of, or to feel special about ourselves.

Because we are not special, we may be able to live casually. We don't have to accomplish anything. Being born to the world and being alive for a while itself justify the meaning of our existence.

We have lived as long as the universe, and so did everything else. Buddha said if you reach enlightenment you would overcome the boundary of life and death. I am not special and I don't have to try hard to be special. I can just follow the flow of my mind and the great nature,, and have a nice dream before I rest forever.

The universe should also be flawed as much as I am flawed. Being flawed and fragile is a universal principle. The people who believe themselves flawless is a fool. Any belief, even God cannot be perfect.

It is comforting to know that everybody is essentially very fragile. I don't have to try hard to become perfect. We, the human beings are nothing. I just need to dream a very nice dream.

This book is good because it lets us know that we are okay to be wrong. Actually we cannot be right or wrong as much as an ant cannot be right or wrong.

2 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Not just minor flaws .... er ...... features

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 21, 2019

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The author stretches across a large spectrum of human traits and flaws in evolution's "best efforts" incremental approach. Ranging from "why do young women prefer men who take risks" to the outsized number of head colds that human have compared to animals, the book was chuck full of delightful ideas. I hadn't really considered how many tradeoffs there are in evolution (nothing comes without a cost) and how difficult it is for nature to make fundamental (versus incremental) changes. Relatively easy to lose a little hair so we can cool ourselves and run down exhausted prey. No so much to get rid of unneeded bones. If something is just there but not taking up resources, evolution often just leaves it alone, so we carry a lot of baggage from previous forms. We also have mental traits that served us once but are dysfunctional now. I'm going to look for more stuff from this guy. He can write a good thriller, even if it is mostly fact based science. He gets more philosophic as the book progresses .... many interesting possibilities for our species.

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A. Edis

Nice - easy to read, good introduction to human biology flaws.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2022

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Lovely book. Is a nice introduction to many of these topics of evolutionary floors we and many animals possess. Many of these things I knew already, but it was nice to read a little more into some of the areas. I certainly recommend for anyone interested in science, the human body and biology in general. I found it very easy to read - but i come from a scientific background too. Would happily read more in depth work - but i doubt this would be attractive to the wider audience. Nice work by Nathan. : )

jfmdac

Lots of interesting information here.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 30, 2018

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I found myself agreeing with just about everything that the back cover reviewers claimed (unusual for me). It's a fascinating exploration of our physical & mental imperfections, leading one to wonder how we have survived this long, never mind the threats of global warming & nuclear apocalypse. There was so much to like and wonder over, but I think for me the sheer readability of what at times were some pretty complicated concepts, made this book so worthwhile.

3 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Thoroughly interesting!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

All the stuff in your body that shows the imprint of evolution - Fascinating stuff (unless you are a creationist - Then you have some explaining to do!).

5 people found this helpful

pseudo

Never pictured myself reading a book about genetics but..

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 23, 2018

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Never pictured myself reading a book a bit medicine, anatomy and genetics.. but I did and I enjoyed it. It's true that it's still peppered with scientific terminology and medical jargon but the author truly makes an efforts to bring this topic to the level of non-expert readers and captivate our attention. I particularly liked the chapters on organs and reproduction..

3 people found this helpful

C

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 29, 2021

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Well written and informative. Just the kind of book to dip into every evening before bed.

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