My Library


     
Limit search to available items

Book Cover
Book
Title Human errors : a panorama of our glitches, from pointless bones to broken genes / Nathan H. Lents.
Publisher Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Copyright ©2018
Description 233 pages : illustrations, charts, map ; 24 cm


LOCATION CALL NUMBER VOL BARCODE LAST CHECKIN STATUS
 EL-Adult Collection  612 LENTS Nearby on shelf  30628000822587 01-30-19  AVAILABLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY Includes bibliographical notes (pages 219-222) and index (pages 223-233).
Summary "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 have such 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 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, 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.
Other edition Online version: Lents, Nathan H., author. Human errors Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 9781328974679
Subject Human physiology.
Human evolution.
ISBN 9781328974693