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

by Nathan H. Lents

Human anatomy is a clumsy hodgepodge of adaptations and maladaptations. We have pointless bones and muscles, underwhelming senses, and joints that don’t quite keep us upright. Then there’s our diet. Whereas most animals do just fine eating the same thing day in and day out, we humans have to have ridiculously varied meals in order to get all the nutrients we need. Most of the contents of our genomes are completely useless, and occasionally they are actually harmful. (We even carry around thousands of dead viruses tucked in the DNA of every one of our cells, and we spend our lifetimes dutifully replicating these carcasses.) And there are yet other, even more astounding imperfections: We are incredibly inefficient at our ultimate goal of making more of ourselves, and we have immune systems that attack our own bodies, just one of many design-related diseases.

The human inability to synthesize such basic things as amino acids certainly exacerbated those crises and made surviving on whatever was available that much harder. During a famine, it’s not the lack of calories that is the ultimate cause of death; it’s the lack of proteins and the essential amino acids they provide.

For squishy, water-based creatures, we humans sure do need a lot of metal in our diets. There are all kinds of metals—known as essential minerals—that we have to eat. Metal ions are single atoms, not complex molecules, and they cannot be synthesized by any living thing. They must be ingested in food or water, and the list of ions that are essential for us includes cobalt, copper, iron, chromium, nickel, zinc, and molybdenum. Even magnesium, potassium, calcium, and sodium are technically metals, and we need substantial amounts of these minerals daily too.

Despite the fact that there is plenty of iron in our bodies, our environment, our earth, and our solar system, deficiencies in iron are among the most common diet-related ailments in humans. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (known as the CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), iron deficiency is the single most common nutritional deficiency in the United States and worldwide. That iron deficiency is pandemic in a world filled with iron is paradoxical, to say the least.

More than twenty years after she first proposed the existence of TEs, they were discovered in bacteria, and this time by more “traditional” research groups (I use these quotes cynically, to mean “led by men”). This forced the scientific community to take another look at McClintock’s work and admit that she was right. In 1983, she was awarded the scientific community’s highest honor—the Nobel Prize.

the cesarean was well known in the ancient world, where a breech birth meant a very good chance of losing both the mother and the baby. Tales of cesarean births of humans or demigods can be found in ancient Indian, Celtic, Chinese, and Roman mythologies. In fact, long before Julius Caesar, there was a Roman law that stated that when a pregnant woman died, a cesarean had to be performed in an attempt to rescue the fetus.

Although many people have no allergies, will never have a stroke, and will escape the horror of an autoimmune disease, cancer is the beast that stalks us all. There is basically a 100 percent chance that, if you live long enough, you will get cancer. It will catch up with you eventually, provided you don’t die of something else.