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Human Errors
- A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
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 - 200 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 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-long evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.
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10% Human
- How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
- By: Alanna Collen
- Narrated by: Cat Gould
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. Over your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African elephants in microbes. You are not an individual but a colony. Until recently, we had thought our microbes hardly mattered, but science is revealing a different story, one in which microbes run our bodies and becoming a healthy human is impossible without them.
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Must read for anyone that wants to be healthy
- By T. Kalinowski on 06-05-21
By: Alanna Collen
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This Is Your Brain on Parasites
- How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society
- By: Kathleen McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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The Language of Life
- DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine
- By: Francis S. Collins
- Narrated by: Greg Itzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. It is no longer just a theoretical shift: every one of us will be touched by it, and many of us already have been. The meaning of disease, our understanding of the human body, and crucial decisions about what we all need to know and what choices we make about our health are at stake. Welcome to the new world of personalized medicine.
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The future of medicine
- By Ronald E on 04-12-10
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The Compatibility Gene
- How Our Bodies Fight Disease, Attract Others, and Define Our Selves
- By: Daniel M. Davis
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of the 25,000 genes we possess are the same for all of us. Compatibility genes are those that vary most from person to person and give each of us a unique molecular signature. These genes determine both the extent to which we are susceptible to a vast range of illnesses and the different ways each of us fights disease.
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If interested in medicine, got to read
- By Howard Sterling on 06-29-16
By: Daniel M. Davis
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The Gene
- An Intimate History
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
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The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
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It's a Wonderful Book
- By JKC on 06-02-16
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A Crack in Creation
- Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
- By: Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos.
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In to the abyss we ascend, a scary future
- By Philomath on 06-17-17
By: Jennifer A. Doudna, and others
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Population Wars
- A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence
- By: Greg Graffin
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
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Performance
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From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations - whether between different species or between rival groups of humans - is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of "the survival of the fittest" explains and often excuses these actions.
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Life Changing Book. No other like it.
- By Abraham R. Herrick-Rough on 05-16-16
By: Greg Graffin
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Sicker, Fatter, Poorer
- The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals on Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do About It
- By: Leonardo Trasande MD MPP
- Narrated by: Leonardo Trasande MD MPP
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Lurking in our homes, hiding in our offices, and polluting the air we breathe is something sinister. Something we’ve turned a blind eye to for far too long. Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician, professor, and world-renowned researcher, tells the story of how our everyday surroundings are making us sicker, fatter, and poorer. Through a blend of narrative, scientific detective work, and concrete information about the connections between chemicals and disease, he reveals what we can do to protect ourselves and our families in the short-term, and how we can help bring the change we deserve.
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The Must Read Book of 2019 is here early on Audio!
- By Ryan S on 12-21-18
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Queen of Fats
- Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them
- By: Susan Allport
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
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A nutritional whodunit that takes readers from Greenland to Africa to Israel, The Queen of Fats gives a fascinating account of how we have become deficient in a nutrient that is essential for good health: the fatty acids know as omega-3s.
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Eye Opener about fats, weight and health!
- By Eric on 12-22-11
By: Susan Allport
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I, Mammal
- By: Liam Drew
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A list of the attributes that define a mammal is a ragbag of things - fur, live birth, three bones in the middle ear, a brain whose two halves are robustly joined together.... But this curious collection of features contain the roots of all the biology that makes us what we are: monkeys with massive brains who parent extensively, enjoy sport and think lots. Which is to say, what makes us mammals makes us human.
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Who knew?
- By Fitmen on 04-25-18
By: Liam Drew
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In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances-antibiotics-threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences.
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Plants play a critical role in how we experience our environment. They create calming green spaces, provide oxygen for us to breathe, and nourish our senses. In The Nature of Plants, ecologist and nursery owner Craig Huegel demystifies the complex lives of plants and provides listeners with an extensive tour into their workings.
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So informative!
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What listeners say about Human Errors
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-29-18
Excellent audio book.
As a physician spending 50 years treating broken bodies science has made astounding Progress. This review deals with many of the problems of our bodies. But I think the future due to our ability and brains with the advancement of science is very bright indeed
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7 people found this helpful
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- Eugenia
- 06-27-19
Updated Review
FIRST REVIEW:
I tried mightily, but I just couldn't finish this book.
I am pretty much alone here in my negative review, but when I listened to the chapter on nutrition and heard what the author said about vegetarians and combining foods (a theory that has been debunked over the years) and other nutritional ideas that promote the eating of animal flesh,
That propaganda, along with lots of angst for people who can't conceive (nature and adoption, anyone?) and no mention of the terrible effects of overpopulation on our planet, along with long passages about how hard it is for humans to conceive and therefore how sad, made it difficult for me to continue listening.
Perhaps the rest of this book would have assuaged my negative opinions, but I didn't feel like continuing especially with the condescending tone of the narrator.
UPDATE:
I finished listening and I'm glad I did. Even though I still agree with what I stated above, the rest of the book really won me over. It proves I might always try to finish listening. Well, almost always.
The self-righteous and pretentious tone softened to explain some very enlightening things about human minds. This part was an in-depth look at cultural, sociological and hereditary aspects of the brain. This was worth the whole book.
Changing the stars from one to three!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Tolly
- 12-04-19
Great read with one little caveat.
I really enjoyed this book. It was well laid out. I just wish we didn't have to end every modern scientific documentary or book with a section on climate change and flawed renewable resources such as wind, with no mention of nuclear energy.
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2 people found this helpful
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- jag
- 06-25-19
Really enjoyed this one.
An approachable overview of the existence of and causes of human maladies. I learned a few new things about the human genome and reasons for human illnesses.
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- Elisabeth Carey
- 06-15-20
Entertaining look at our glitches and flaws
Nathan Lents gives us a lively and interesting look at some of the major flaws of the human body--starting with our eyes, and working downward. Our lenses are backwards. Our wrists and ankles have extra, unnecessary bones that serve no real function. We have a variety of genetic diseases, more than most other species, and they don't get effectively selected against for a variety of frustrating reasons. Once a gene acquires a mutation, it tends to accumulate more mutations. Once that happens, the problem can't be fixed by another single mutation of the kind that caused the original problem. The deletion of our ability to manufacture our own vitamin C, like most mammals, got deleted in a common ancestor of primate species long ago. It wasn't selected against because all the early primates lived in the midst of a vitamin C-rich food supply. That mutation has been accumulating more mutations since long before genus homo arose. We're not getting it back.
Others are even more frustrating. The mutation that causes sickle cell anemia causes a devastating, painful, deadly disease--if you get two copies of that gene, one each from father and mother. It ought to have been selected against long ago! Oh, except for one inconvenient fact. If you get only one copy of the disease, you have a higher than normal resistance to malaria. Malaria can also debilitate and kill you. Someone who has one copy of the sickle cell gene doesn't get sickle cell, and is less likely to get malaria, and more likely to survive malaria if they do. In regions where malaria is a major problem, people with one copy of the sickle cell gene will be more likely to live long enough to have more offspring, and thus more descendants--even though some of them will have sickle cell anemia due to getting two copies of the gene.
Nor are we really fully adapted to walking upright, or to giving birth to children with such large brains. Our babies are born several months earlier than they "should" be, based on the degree of development they have at birth, even compared to our closest relatives, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.
I can't do credit to Lents' writing of this, or to L.J. Ganser's reading of it. It's informative and enjoyable.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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- Joseph P. Fowler
- 01-15-21
Perfect overview of the body's quirks.
It was effortless to listen to and the candor kept it interesting the whole way through. It just ended and it was like the cable cutting out in the middle of a show your were really enjoying except it wrapped up perfectly before it did.
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- Stephen H
- 05-22-21
Enjoyable romp through our design flaws
The author provides an interesting overview of some of the failings of evolution when it comes to the human body - and brain. Whether it's garbage code in our DNA, or failure of the modern human brain to adapt to modern living, or eyes that are back to front, there is a lot of shoddiness in the human body. Simply standing up puts strain on bits that were not designed to operate in this configuration. And I for one want the ability to synthesise my own vitamins rather than having to get them from an external source.
Narrator was fine, no major issues there.
In all, a fascinating, sometimes amusing and often tragic tale of how evolution has given humans a raw deal (sort of, maybe, in some areas).
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- Tim Bryant
- 10-15-23
Very interesting read
Although some of this text gave me anxiety it was nevertheless very interesting to learn how the body works and why it is designed the way it is.
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- Dan
- 01-10-19
Thought provoking and informative
I enjoyed the detailed explanation of flaws in human anatomy and psychology. Well presented in a form that was not confusing, even for some of the more complex topics.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Wally Brewer
- 09-07-18
Will Make You Think
Lents gives not just a list of errors in our bodies, but also provides a necessary understanding of how messed up our bodies aware compared to other animals. He says humans seem to have more errors than most animals probably because our brains evolved to allow us the luxury of taking some of the pressure off of our bodies. With the decrease in selection pressure did not need to be as “fit” as before. In the epilogue, Lents also discusses some very interesting ideas about the future implications of human errors and how we might overcome them.
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11 people found this helpful