Human Errors: A Conversation About Evolution’s Mistakes

San Francisco Public Library is pleased to bring biology professor and forensic scientist Dr. Nathan Lents to the Main Library for a talk titled “Human Errors: A Conversation About Evolution’s Mistakes”.

For such “highly evolved creatures,” humans harbor a surprising number of glitches, quirks, and outright flaws. We have retinas that face backward, the stump of a tail, muscles that attach to nothing, and nerves that take bizarre paths. We must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves. Millions of us can't reproduce successfully without help from modern science. As biologist Nathan H. Lents explain in his new book, Human Errors, our evolutionary history is a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last.

Join us as idea innovator and host of the “Curious Minds” podcast Gayle Allen leads a discussion of our many shortcomings. Rather than a source of sorrow and despair, our many quirks serve as windows into the topsy-turvy history of our evolution past.