Comments on: Book review – Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

By: Book review – Imperfection: A Natural History | The Inquisitive Biologist

Book review – Imperfection: A Natural History | The Inquisitive Biologist — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 12:35:43 +0000

[…] of these six laws uses quite a lot of examples from human biology (I recognized many from reviewing Human Errors). Our DNA and brains both resemble Rube Goldberg Machines that are so “unnecessarily […]

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By: Book review – The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries: The Evidence and the People Who Found It | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 15:42:21 +0000

[…] There are classic topics such as convergent evolution, the evolution of the eye, and Lynn Margulis and her theory of endosymbiosis. The relatively young branch of evolutionary developmental biology and the discovery of Hox genes showed that, actually, yes, nature does make leaps and does not always result in slow and gradual changes. Throughout, Prothero repeatedly reminds you that the evolutionary relationships between organisms are like a bush, and not a linear progression from primitive to more advanced creatures. He explains that evolution does not always result in perfect adaptations – they only have to be good enough to help in producing the next generation. And he points out that natural selection can only ever work with the material at hand, resulting in many jury-rigged contrivances, including in humans. […]

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By: Book review – What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 15:42:39 +0000

[…] us at constant risk of choking are but two of many examples that Nathan Lents discussed in his book Human Errors. We know that evolution cannot simply start from scratch and that it reuses, repurposes, and […]

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By: Book review – Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:53:32 +0000

[…] (of course) how astronomy made us the centre of the universe no more. How evolution explained the maddening imperfections in our body, a ramshackle patchwork that is a far cry from an intelligent design. How the anthropic principle, […]

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By: Book review – Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are | The Inquisitive Biologist

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 14:05:27 +0000

[…] body, a ramshackle patchwork that is a far cry from an intelligent design (see also my review of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes). How the anthropic principle, the idea that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for human life, is but […]

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By: Book review – Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 14:39:05 +0000

[…] also mentioned in Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, modern sequencing technology has revealed that our DNA is littered with remnants of retroviruses, […]

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By: Book review – The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol | The Inquisitive Biologist

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 09:34:13 +0000

[…] evolution is often limited by the material at hand and the legacy of the past (see my review of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes). The problem is that this potentially allows you to invoke slow or fast evolution depending on […]

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By: Artem Kaznatcheev

Artem Kaznatcheev — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 13:22:31 +0000

Nice review!

I should really pick up this book, since I have a strong research interest in how optimality theories in biology can be misleading. It would be good to have a nice catalog of examples.

Discussion of ‘cognitive errors’ can be especially difficult, since there the ‘correct’ position is usually judged against an econ inspired prescription of rationality, instead of measured in terms of actual effects on fitness. This fetish for rationality as an ideal can be addressed well by things like Hoffman’s interface theory. I guess this adds a fifth perspective on imperfections: a misalignment between what we judge as optimal versus what evolutionary pressures would judge as optimal.

And of course, even to consider deviations from optimality as surprising, we have no inherently assume that local fitness peaks are easily reachable. So a sixth perspective: even without change in environmental pressures, a hard fitness landscapes can keep us from finding even locally optimal phenotypes.

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