In the beginning, there was imperfection, which became the source of all things. Anomalies and asymmetries caused planets to take shape from the bubbling void and sent light into darkness. Life on earth is a catalog of accidents, alternatives, and errors that turned out to work quite well. In this book, Telmo Pievani shows that life on our planet has flourished and survived not because of its perfection but despite (and perhaps because of) its imperfection. He begins his story with the disruption-filled birth of the universe and proceeds through the random DNA copying errors that fuel evolution, the transformations of advantages into handicaps by natural selection, the anatomical and functional jumble that is the human brain, and our many bodily mismatches.
Along the way, Pievani tells readers about the Irish elk (incidentally, neither Irish nor elk), whose enormous antlers serve to illustrate the first two laws of imperfection; the widespread dissemination of costly or useless traits; and the neuroimperfection of the human brain—"a frozen accident of evolution that was not designed from scratch," as Pievani calls it. He sizes up the alleged perfection of the human body, asking, for example, if everything in our bodies serves a purpose, why do we have appendixes? Why bipedalism, with the inevitable back pain that results? In this fascinating account, Pievani offers the first comprehensive explanatory theory for the ubiquity of imperfection.
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Subtopic
BiologyIndex
Biological SciencesTable of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword ix
- 1 A Subtle Imperfection: And So It All Began 1
- 2 Imperfect Evolution 17
- 3 Imperfections That Work 39
- 4 The Imprint of Uselessness in DNA 65
- 5 A Proverbial Jumble: The Human Brain 83
- 6 The Imperfect Sage 103
- 7 Would You Buy a Secondhand Car from a Homo sapiens? 121
- In Conclusion, the Laws of Imperfection 143
- References and Further Reading 151
- Index 159
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Yes, you can access Imperfection by Telmo Pievani, Michael Gerard Kenyon in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Biology. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.