Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
By: Nathan H. Lents / Narrated By: LJ Ganser
Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
How beautiful the human body is… until it’s NOT!!!
So here I am, in my early 50s, and soooo much of Human Errors by Nathan H. Lents is pinging around my (FLAWED) brain. While the human body is a tremendous work of art and evolution, it’s also riddled with so many mistakes of design and structure that it’s rather disheartening.
Lents covers it all. From stupid extra bones that are there just to break or ossify, to why humans seem to be the only species that has problems with reproduction. You don’t see gazelles in a fertility clinic, so why us? And why, by the way, are we born so gosh-danged neeeedy?!? Other animals, say horses, have their young born, ready to stand, ready to run like hell. But we humans? Oh, pshaw! We’re totally screwed!
L. J. Ganser narrates it all with sweet-tempered avuncular charm. He’s delivering death blows like: If you live long enough, if something else doesn’t get you, you have a 100% chance of getting CANCER!!! He makes it all sound so charming, so amusing, when really, you hear stuff like that, and you’re toes are cramping up into curls. So Bravo, Ganser! I laughed even as I was rolling my eyes or screeching in terror. Plus, you chalked up my recent sinus infection to flawed design/placement of the sinuses rather than on me just being a goofball who couldn’t blow m’ nose hard enough, often enough. Well done, and thank you!
Don’t expect a scientific book chalk full of stats; stories come with each description of major booboos. I really enjoyed the part on why we gamble. The usual culprit, that hit of dopamine, wasn’t addressed, rather it was all explained away by human behavior fraught with poor choice-making abilities. We’re wired to screw ourselves over!
Can I say this book is charming? I want to, but it whacks you upside the head so much, one is left wondering how we survive to greet another day as often as we do. But I thoroughly enjoyed it—even if at the end human destruction seems to be naturally assured. As we make ingenious strides in technology, our way of life brings us close to peril. So then he tops it by stating specific ingenious strides in technology which can actually help us retroactively; so there’s hope. Uhm, oh I dunno. Jury’s still TOTALLY out on THAT one. By the way, he posits that the reason we haven’t been visited by beings from advanced civilizations residing in other parts of the Universe is because said civilizations probably destroyed themselves too.
So WAH!
Still, a fun way to spend 7 hours and 54 minutes. Besides, who DOESn’t like to see a train wreck? Just can’t keep from craning our necks to view the gruesome aftermath, huh?
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