Nathan Lents on the imperfection of the human body (it’s evolution, of course)

January 10, 2020 • 12:45 pm

UPDATE:  I found out that the well-known evolutionary geneticist John C. Avise published a related book in 2010, but one that concentrates on a different line of evidence for evolution. John’s book (screenshot of cover below with link to Amazon) lays out the many suboptimal features of the human genome. He thus concentrates on molecular evidence, noting the many features in that bailiwick whose imperfection gives evidence for evolution and against intelligent design.  Lents’s and Avise’s books thus make a good pair, since the former seems to deal mostly with anatomy and physiology and the latter with molecular data. I’ll be reading both of them.

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Biologist Nathan Lents, whose abbreviated c.v. is given below, has been featured on this site before, both as a critic of creationism (good), but also as a defender of the Adam-and-Eve apologetics pushed by his religious friend Josh Swamidass (bad). But chalk up another two marks on Lents’s “good” side.  First, he’s written a book (click on screenshot below) that lays out all the suboptimal features of the human body—features whose imperfection gives evidence for evolution. I’m getting the book for teaching purposes, and here’s the Amazon summary:

Dating back to Darwin himself, the “argument from poor design” holds that examples of suboptimal structure/function demonstrate that nature does not have a designer. Perhaps surprisingly, human beings have more than our share of quirks and glitches. Besides speaking to our shared ancestry, these evolutionary “seams” reveal interesting things about our past. This offers a unique accounting of our evolutionary legacy and sheds new light on how to live in better harmony with our bodies, in all their flawed glory.

Nathan Lents is Professor of Biology at John Jay College and author of two recent books: Not So Different and Human Errors. With degrees in molecular biology and human physiology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in computational genomics, Lents tackles the evolution of human biology from a broad and interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to his research and teaching, he can be found defending sound evolutionary science in the pages of Science, Skeptic Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and others.

And here’s a half-hour Center for Inquiry talk, clearly based on his book, in which Lents discusses how the flaws in the human body instantiate evolution. It’s not just that there are flaws—which support the notion that natural selection doesn’t produce absolute perfection, but simply the best result available given the existing genetic variation—but, more important: those flaws are understandable as the result of our evolution from ancestors who were different from us.

Some of Lents’s examples (like our broken gene in the Vitamin C synthesis pathway), are discussed in WEIT, but others, like the bizarre configuration of our nasal sinuses, aren’t. I haven’t seen the book, but it looks like a good compendium of evidence for evolution using something that everyone’s familiar with: the glitches and bugs in the human body.

It’s a good talk, and Lents is an energetic and lucid lecturer. I recommend that you listen to this, for you’ll learn stuff that will stay with you, and also serve to help you argue with creationists.

h/t: Michael

43 thoughts on “Nathan Lents on the imperfection of the human body (it’s evolution, of course)”

  1. I would be interested in seeing your comparison of this book with Neil Shubin’s The Universe Within, which looks like it covers the same topic.

    I have Shubin’s book, but have not read it yet (I have read his Your Inner Fish).

  2. Like Immanuel Kant pandering to his believer servant about the soul, this author panders to his believer friends, don’t we all, while writing all about the obvious evolutionary foibles that a god somehow allows?

    1. As a surgeon, I owe my children’s college fund to these foibles. Your gallbladder can kill you eight different ways, probably more! Hurrah for antagonistic pleiotropy. At least until it starts in on me.

      1. I’m trying to think of some different lyrics for that “50 ways to leave your lover” song , along the lines of “50 ways to die from your bladder. Gall, urinary … is that the total of human bladders. You can add a few types of deaths from kicking inflated pig’s bladders around to the list too.

      2. I decided to be strong and tolerate occasional (6x/year) gallbladder pain. Perhaps I should change my mind.

        1. M’lady, maybe this will help.

          The reason I’m writing this from the mansion featured here some years back is because the previous custodian who had cared for it for nearly 30yrs, known widely in Pittsburgh as the head of the county health dept, and who was also regarded by many as an “excellent diagnostician”, died from a necrotic gall bladder and the sepsis that came with it. For tragically altruistic reasons he had been putting off surgery, instead treating the pain with aspirin. He required several units of blood just to get his clotting times up to the point where the surgeons could go in after he finally went to the hospital. His comment on admission the the ER was apparently, “I waited too long.”

  4. On my list of books to read in the coming months. Hope it is as good as Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin.

  5. I am almost done reading this book and it is fine but nothing special. He writes well and gives a lot of examples but it does not challenge someone with a good background in genetics.

    I have learned lots of new facts but no new ideas.

    1. I finished the book in my lunch hour and the book fizzles out. The chapter on error of the brain (e.g. cognitive bias) was weak. The final chapter was meandering speculation about immortality, alien life and possible human extinction.

      He writes like an above average science reporter. Scientists who write well (Dawkins, Coyne, Shubin, etc.) inspire your thoughts. Even when I disagree with a book by most scientists (e.g. The Beauty of Evolution by Prum), I feel challenged.

      But this book was not provoking.

  8. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say that evolution makes things perfect. I think they get that idea from dramatic examples like the human eye, or the wing of a bird. These are indeed remarkable and intricate devices that serve their “purpose” brilliantly, but evolution doesn’t always get it perfect. Probably good enough most of the time would be a better way of putting it.

    1. Yeah, but it does not make perfection. Only ‘good enuf’. In large part b/c body parts are re-purposed from other body parts. Wings from legs; legs from fins, and so on.

    2. But then when they develop sacro-iliac joint pain, plantar fasciitis and high cholesterol they suddenly go silent.

      1. Why, oh God, did you create the plantar fasciitis? Oh, sure. It got me out of war, but couldn’t you have played it down after the Nam?

  10. I am still using the fossil record and what I learned in Vertebrate History in college. Someone recommended a textbook on here. I’d like to read that. I used to argue with creationists a lot more and I was terrible to them sometimes. The last time I was talking about evolution and religion was in 2015 with Muslims. It was a Muslim hotline and I kept getting the same man. He told me that Muslims support evolution. He was going to have a woman in my area call me (I don’t know why a woman) and she never called. I didn’t follow up. The Mormons follow up with me all of the time (once a year really) and I have said I’m busy for a while. The fact that there are Templeton people who have degrees in biology scares me.

    1. The fact that there are Templeton people who have degrees in biology scares me.

      As Marvin would put it, “It gives me a headache to think down to that level.”

  12. I’ve read both Human Errors and Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals.
    Lents is an excellent writer and I receive his monthly email postings. I’m glad he receives both support and criticism on WEIT as needed.

    1. Lents is an excellent writer and I receive his monthly email postings.

      How does one get on his email list?

  13. This reminds me of the joke about the bad elements of human design that ends with the line, “What competent planner whould have run the main sewer lines right through the middle of the entertainment district?”

    1. It is a good joke, but entertainers and entertainment produce plenty of … excretions.

  19. I have read Avise’s book and it had a lot of fascinating detail plus an index of disorders by the type of mistake that causes them.

    I think by now there will have been enough new sequencing for a 2nd edition, or at least a revision of that index.

    The book is a curious read — very sciency for pages and pages and then out of the blue a screed against Discoveroids. I enjoyed both voices.

  20. Inside the Human Genome starts (after the Preface) with a chapter that appears to have little to do with the title, and is likely to be seen as a slap in the face by religious readers (samples including at least most of chapter one are viewable via Barnes&Noble’s Nook and via Google Play Books). I don’t think any IDer would make it to the end of the first chapter.

    Lents’ Human Errors is considerably lighter on “god” content (the word appearing a mere 5 times including the table of contents, notes, and once in “demigods”). The ToC and notes reference the heading of a chapter (“Why God Invented Doctors”). The remaining reference is about the etymology of the word “nectar”. Nevertheless, without explicitly saying so, the book clearly refutes the claims of ID.

    Another good read is Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, mentioned briefly in https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/adam-rutherford-calls-the-jack-the-ripper-identification-a-joke/
    It’s a much more believer-friendly work than Avise’s, but by no means accepting of fundamentalism; the Introduction mentions Biblical inconsistencies, lack of contemporary evidence, etc., and the Epilogue refers to creationist claims as “zombie arguments presented by creationist dolts”. The book might hold the interest of young adults; the title of the first chapter is “Horny and Mobile”. There’s good discussion of non-coding DNA and other topics.

  21. Several people have mentioned Neil Shubin’s excellent “Your Inner Fish” – highly recommended from here too.
    In a minor attack of “Small World Syndrome”, I just stumbled across a paper from Shubin (et al – busy guy, Al) in last month’s PNAS. Unsurprisingly, Tiktallik is being taken for another little stroll in the swamp. “Fin ray patterns at the fin-to-limb transition”Abstract : To explain how limbs evolved from fins, paleontologists have traditionally studied the endoskeleton. Here, we provide a comparative analysis of the other skeletal system of fins, the dermal skeleton. We describe dermal ray anatomy for 3 species of tetrapodomorph fishes. These data show that, prior to the origin of digits, dermal rays were simplified, the fin web became reduced in size, and the top and bottom of the fin became more asymmetric. These changes reveal how fins became adapted for interacting with the substrate prior to the fin-to-limb transition and that dorsoventral asymmetry is an important, understudied axis of diversification in paired fins.
    (Gravel-Inspection) As time (and species) passed, both count and length of the fin rays decreased, bringing the endoskeleton (humerus, radius and ulna ; wrist elements) more directly into load-bearing contact with the substrate. As almost always, things aren’t quite as simple as in the cartoons. the development of the tetrapod hand (and foot) isn’t just the appearance of the stereotypical five fingers, and these limbs illustrate a reduction in the fin structures while there are a number of digits appearing in their place. The slightly later tetrapods Acanthostega and Ichthyostega didn’t have five digit hands, but (if I recall correctly, six-, seven- and eight- digit hands (and feet), with different numbers of digits on the hands and feet of one – Acanthostega, IIRC.

    For those who like their podcasts, my mate Dave Marshall (we spend several months co-incarcerated on an oil rig) has a couple of episodes on Tiktaalik here.

    1. What a coincidence – or something in the subject of stumbling around with evolution 🙂 triggers it – I thought of the same paper! The dermal rays happens to fit the early hand like a glove in the reconstruction, yet they were temporary make-dos.

      1. I think it’s just normal Small World syndrome. I juts logged in to Jerry’s “how to wake a rabbit” in preference to actually paying attention to the 14th (approx) chapter of Scott’s “Alien” succession of remakes. I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by the spoiler that it involves waking the hibernating crew of a spaceship in response to an unidentified signal in deep space.
        (I’d rather hoped that there would be some new meat in the “Prometheus” arc of the story ; don’t worry, your novelty juices need not bestir themselves.)

  23. natural selection doesn’t produce absolute perfection, but simply the best result available given the existing genetic variation

    I would have thought recessives or balancing selection that keeps less fit alleles around would argue against that selection always achieve an optimum (“best result”)? Also, the blending into near neutral drift and the time scales (say, how the genetic code is nearly “optimal” but there are better variants at a 10^-6 frequency) could be taken as exposed problems.

    Switching to my physics hat, I would say that “it tends towards optimum” which I feel is more defensible.

  24. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to read the Avise, but I’m sure to read any review that comes my way.

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