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.

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, Spry, plausible, free from jargon and much better than the usual run of popular science and medical books, which are destined to be shelved in the den of geek, Human Errors is the most enjoyable anatomical study since Jonathan Miller's The Body in Question, Chatty and humorous... After reading Human Errors, nobody will see their body in the same way again, Like any theme park horror house, it's a thoroughly entertaining ride, crammed full of the bizarre and enlightening and ripe with facts with which to wow dinner party guests

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. www.nathanlents.com@nathanlents