Podcasts Health Physician's Guide to Doctoring with Bradley B. Block, MD Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

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

Published: June 13, 2019, 4:06 p.m.

Professor Nathan Lents studied biology at St. Louis University and then completed his PhD at St. Louis University\u2019s school of medicine in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences.\xa0 PhDs need residencies, too, so he did his postdoctoral training in cancer genomics at NYU and loved New York so much that he stayed and is now a Professor at John Jay College in Manhattan and director of the honors program.\xa0 He maintains the Human Evolution Blog and his podcast is called This World of Humans.\xa0\xa0

His book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, discusses the beauty of our flaws.\xa0 We are not the well-oiled machines that we think we are.\xa0 In today\u2019s episode we start by discussing how this book caused an unexpected run-in with the intelligent design folks, and then get into the cognitive biases and heuristics that help shape our reality and how this, while designed as an advantage, can frequently be a disadvantage in our modern world. \xa0We then get into the design flaws, like the vitamins that we should be able to make ourselves but can\u2019t, vitamins and minerals we absorb poorly or in the wrong place, and finally end on the paleo diet and intermittent fasting.\xa0 You\u2019ll have to listen to the end to find out which this evolutionary biologist advocates and why.

He can be found at NathanLents.com