Human Errors Quotes

“There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly. If life on earth were like the Olympic Games, the only event that humans would ever win is the decathlon. (Unless chess became an Olympic sport.)”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“We have retinas that face backward, the stump of a tail, and way too many bones in our wrists. We must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves. We are poorly equipped to survive in the climates in which we now live. We have nerves that take bizarre paths, muscles that attach to nothing, and lymph nodes that do more harm than good. Our genomes are filled with genes that don’t work, chromosomes that break, and viral carcasses from past infections. We have brains that play tricks on us, cognitive biases and prejudices, and a tendency to kill one another in large numbers. Millions of us can’t even reproduce successfully without a whole lot of help from modern science. Our flaws illuminate not only our evolutionary past but also our present and future. 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. The same is true for our bodies, our genes, and our minds.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“You may have heard that humans use only 10 percent of their brains. This is a total myth; humans use every lobe, fold, and nook of their neural tissues. While some regions specialize in certain functions— speech, for instance, or movement— and rev up their activity when performing them, the whole brain is active pretty much all of the time. There is no part of the brain, no matter how tiny, that can be deactivated or removed without serious consequences.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“Nearly half of human DNA is made of autonomously replicating, highly repetitive, dangerously jumping, pure genetic nonsense that the body dutifully copies and maintains in each one of its billions of cells.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“nearly all animals on the planet make plenty of their own vitamin C, usually in their livers,”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“Add to these dangers the very good chance that a pandemic could strike at any point. Humans now exist in such density that infectious diseases spread like wildfire. When we add to this the ease of global travel, a doomsday scenario is not hard to imagine.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria, and there would be no music.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“Scurvy is a dystopian novel written by the human body.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“For most modern humans in the developed world now, losing some money generally means that they might have to scale back some aspects of their lifestyles. Losing resources in the Pleistocene epoch might have meant starvation. Thus, extreme aversion to loss also made good sense. When the alternative is an almost certain death, taking a risk doesn’t seem so foolish.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“many animals purchase sexual access with food or other gifts. There are penguins that trade sex for nest-building materials. (If you’re interested, I have a whole section on prostitution among animals in my book Not So Different.)”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“In humans, the vertebral disks are in an arrangement that is optimal for knuckle-draggers, not upright walkers. They still do a decent job of lubricating and supporting the spine, but they are much more prone to being pushed out of position than the vertebral disks of other animals. They are structured to resist gravity by pulling the vertebral joints toward the chest, as if humans were on all fours. With our upright posture, however, gravity often pulls them backward or downward, not toward the chest. Over time, this uneven pressure creates protuberances in the cartilage. This is known as a spinal disk herniation or, more commonly, a “slipped disk.” Spinal disk herniation is nearly unheard of in any primate species but us.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“The life cycle of a retrovirus includes a step in which its genetic material is actually inserted into the genome of the host cell, like a parasite made of pure DNA.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“We are in an exciting new era of biomedical research. Scientists can now read the entire sequence of someone’s genome, all 4.6 billion letters spread across the forty-six chromosomes, in a process that takes just a couple of weeks and costs about a thousand dollars. (The first complete sequencing of a human genome took over a decade to finish and cost nearly three hundred million dollars.)”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“We are very well adapted to our environment, but we are not perfectly adapted. Little imperfections exist. It’s possible that, if our ancestors had lived the hunter-gatherer life for a longer time before moving into the modern era of vaccines and surgery, evolution would have continued to perfect human anatomy. However, that environment, like all environments, was so dynamic that evolution would simply have substituted our current imperfections for others. Evolution is a continual process — never quite complete.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“Remember, too, that natural selection flips these switches randomly, like a chimpanzee at a typewriter. If we wait long enough, the chimp will write a sonnet, but the wait will be long indeed. For anatomy, the result is a whole lot of baggage lying around.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“symptoms. A friend of mine has an often debilitating suite of symptoms that come from chronic fatigue syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis, two probably related autoimmune diseases. She has been told by medical professionals, “Well, none of us feel that great first thing in the morning”; “It sounds to me like you need to get out of the house more and get more physical exercise”; and the always helpful “This could just be in your head, but either way, lying around won’t help.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes