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商品描述
In praise of imperfection: how life on our planet is a catalog of imperfections, errors, alternatives, and anomalies.
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.
商品描述(中文翻譯)
在讚美不完美：我們星球上的生命是一部不完美、錯誤、替代方案和異常的目錄。
一開始，便是這不完美，成為萬物的源頭。異常和不對稱使行星從沸騰的虛空中形成，並將光明送入黑暗。地球上的生命是一部意外、替代方案和錯誤的目錄，這些意外最終運作得相當良好。在這本書中，Telmo Pievani 展示了我們星球上的生命之所以繁榮和生存，並不是因為它的完美，而是儘管（或許正因為）它的不完美。他以宇宙充滿擾動的誕生開始他的故事，接著講述了推動進化的隨機 DNA 複製錯誤，自然選擇將優勢轉變為劣勢的過程，人類大腦的解剖和功能混亂，以及我們身體的許多不匹配之處。
在這個過程中，Pievani 向讀者介紹了愛爾蘭麋鹿（順便提一下，它既不是愛爾蘭的也不是麋鹿），其巨大的鹿角用來說明不完美的前兩條法則；昂貴或無用特徵的廣泛傳播；以及人類大腦的神經不完美——Pievani 稱之為「一個未從零開始設計的進化凍結意外」。他評估了人類身體所謂的完美，舉例問道，如果我們身體中的一切都有其目的，那麼為什麼我們會有闌尾？為什麼要雙足行走，卻必然導致背痛？在這個引人入勝的敘述中，Pievani 提出了不完美普遍存在的首個綜合解釋理論。
作者簡介
Telmo Pievani is Full Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Padua, where he covers the first Italian chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences. A leading science communicator and columnist for Il Corriere della Sera, he is the author of The Unexpected Life, Creation without God, Serendipity, and other books.
作者簡介(中文翻譯)
Telmo Pievani 是帕多瓦大學生物學系的全職教授，擔任義大利首個生物科學哲學的講座教授。他是一位領先的科學傳播者，也是《Il Corriere della Sera》的專欄作家，著有《意外的生命》、《無神的創造》、《意外發現》等書籍。
