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

by Nathan H. Lents

little interest in television is that their retinal neurons work so much faster than ours that they actually see the flashes, which must be awfully annoying. Birds tend to have higher flicker fusion thresholds than mammals, helping to explain their impressive abilities to hunt quick prey such as fish and flying insects.

They would even sometimes specifically cite limitations of the opposing study that were also present in the study they agreed with! In other experiments, scientists have gone even further by giving participants fabricated studies regarding affirmative action and gun control, two political hot topics.

confirmation bias: it pervades our political climate, which is why no one has ever changed his or her mind on an issue because of an argument on Facebook.)

Another manifestation of confirmation bias is something called the Forer effect, named for Bertram Forer,

“monkeynomics,” an environment in which capuchin monkeys have been trained to

use and understand currency.

Another form of human irrationality is found in our species’ extreme sensitivity to the influence of anecdotes. Often, one particular event in your life, or even something told to you by someone else, can overpower everything else you know about the phenomenon in question.

reason that anecdotes are so much more powerful than data is once again that our minds are trapped in the world of finite math and small numbers.

Human brains have grown more than twice as much over the past one million years than they did in the five million years before that.

some specific group of individuals reproduces more than other groups, that group will contribute more to the gene pool of the next generation.

never before, and intermarriage is happening at increasing rates. This could lead to the merging of the human species back into one interbreeding population—something that has not occurred, in all likelihood, since our species first originated in a small corner of Africa a couple of hundred thousand years ago.