Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

A  biology professor's "funny, fascinating" tour of the physical  imperfections—from faulty knees to junk DNA—that make us human  (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.

 "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 The Monkey in  the Mirror