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

by Nathan H. Lents

Everyone knows that it is impossible to understand current events in a specific country without understanding the history of that country and how the modern state came to be.

Evolution is a constant game of tradeoffs.

Some birds literally see the Earth’s magnetic field.

It is what it is.

No robot arm will ever be designed to imitate our nonsensical bone structure.

The only constant in life is change.

However, among the poor, especially in developing countries, a varied diet is not always an option. There are billions of humans who subsist on extremely simple diets consisting of just a few staples, and those staples often do not provide enough of some of the essential amino acids, especially lysine. In some remote Chinese villages, the poorest of the poor will live on nothing but rice and the occasional scrap of meat, egg, or bean curd. In the poorest parts of Africa, the most destitute subsist on diets composed almost entirely of wheat products, and even those become scarce during famines. Unsurprisingly, given examples like these, protein deficiency is the single most life-threatening dietary problem in the developing world. This problem stems directly from our species’ inability to make certain amino acids.

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.

This is at least part of the reason why migrations of preagricultural human communities largely followed coastlines or other bodies of water: fish were a more reliable source of iron than meat.

In fact, humans have roughly the same number of genes as microscopic roundworms, which have no real tissues or organs. Just saying.

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.

The most remarkable fact about human fertility is that up to 85 percent of all miscarriages are due to chromosomal abnormalities, meaning that the new embryo has extra, missing, or badly broken chromosomes. Doing the math, this means that when a human sperm and a human egg fuse, the resulting embryo ends up with the proper number of intact chromosomes only around two-thirds of the time. The remaining 15 percent of miscarriages are caused by a variety of congenital conditions, such as spina bifida or hydrocephalus.

As of 2014, all but one of the major developed countries had an infant mortality rate below 0.5 percent. The one exception is the United States, which, at 0.58 percent, has a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba, Croatia, Macau, and New Caledonia. (This is due in large part to two particular practices by American doctors: the frequent medical induction of labor, which artificially accelerates the natural process of childbirth, and the overuse of cesarean sections. The reason C-sections are performed so often in the United States? Lawyers. Doctors fear being sued on the off chance that a C-section was needed but wasn’t performed. But tragically, these invasive abdominal surgeries often involve many fatal complications of their own.) By contrast, the infant mortality rate in Japan is 0.20 percent, and in Monaco, it’s 0.18 percent.

Adult male orcas spend much more of their time hunting and foraging with their mothers

whales have impressive memories,

period most crucial to human evolution was the Pleistocene epoch,

(This research reflects another fact about 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.)

Some money is simply lost, and trying to get it back should never be used as a reason to stay in a losing situation.

course, currency is a human invention with no direct correlate in the natural world, and for most of human history, economics involved the exchange of actual commodities

Stories carry more weight with us than generalized statistics do because we can relate to the protagonists of a story and feel empathy for them.

but you can’t really comprehend ten million of anything.

While explaining the risks of drugs to a high school student might seem like a logical way to dissuade him from trying them, it probably has the opposite effect.

Explaining that drugs are risky could make them more attractive to kids, especially young boys.

First of all, evolving to be smarter requires a fairly ordered progression of a lot of mutations, such as those allowing the expansion of the cranium, the growth of the brain itself, greater interconnectedness of brain areas, and so on.

Second, at least in mammals, it also requires changes in female reproductive anatomy to accommodate larger craniums during childbirth. Third, brains are extremely energy-hungry and thus place intense demands on organisms to acquire enough calories to support them. For example, the human brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s daily energy expenditures, more than any other single organ. The fact that so many long-persisting lineages, such as sharks, horseshoe crabs, and turtles, never bothered to evolve big brains underscores how costly and improbable it is.

Natural selection may not be shaping us anymore, but evolution is still at work.

An extreme expression of this notion is the planetarium hypothesis, which states that some sort of protective sphere has been built around us to filter out the noises from extraterrestrial civilizations but allow the background cosmic signals through.

Another explanation is that our assumptions are wrong and life is exceedingly rare in the universe. Maybe the rapid germination of life on Earth was an incredibly unlikely fluke and the other rare places that have been so lucky are so far away that radio signals have not had time to travel between them and us.

There is another explanation, an even darker one, that many scientists, myself included, are starting to worry about. It may be that life is relatively commonplace in the universe, but it appears — and disappears — over unfathomably immense timescales during periods that rarely if ever overlap.

species’ current trajectory, major economic and political collapse may be likely.

Evolution has never shown an ability to plan ahead more than a generation or two.

Perhaps the same scenario repeats itself throughout the history of the universe, endless boom-and-bust cycles where a civilization almost takes the crucial next steps before blowing itself back to the agrarian days (if it’s lucky) and starting all over again.

Chaos, death, and destruction may be the true natural state of the universe and of all species, including ours.

What has defined our past will define our future.