Standing on Two Feet Isn’t Easy: Our Journey to Imperfection

It’s Andy here today. Ann is over in OurLittleCorner with a 14-second, slightly-risqué video and a bloody good recipe.

A while back I came upon a citation to  “Imperfection: A Natural History“ by Telmo Pievani.   The “Imperfection” in the title piqued my interest because I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert in the imperfection field.  Those who have followed my blogs know that, among other things, I am “directionally challenged,” unable to sustain phone conversations, terrible at following recipes, a dud when it comes to telling our kids about the birds and the bees, and spastic with a fly rod.  Indeed, if there were an Imperfectionist Hall of Fame, I would be a shoo-in.

So, I bought a copy of the Pievani book to see if he had anything new to say about imperfection.  He did in fact say something new (at least to me)- and once I started reading the book I couldn’t put it down.  I became obsessed with it. The imperfection that Pievani discusses is massive and essentially encompasses what it means to be “human.”

This is pretty heady stuff.  But Pievani somehow makes it all very accessible. His book reads like a novel where the protagonist is the bumbling, but lovable, force of “evolutionary selection” and the plot is about the absurdity of human pretentiousness.  Obviously, I can’t do justice to Pievani’s contribution in a brief blog post.  But I’ll share some of his insights about our human “imperfections” that resonated with me .

Pievani debunks the idea that the evolutionary process  is a force of nature that steadily prods living things toward perfection.  Evolution, he points out, is a hit and miss operation that sometimes leads to moderate success and sometimes to dismal failure (think extinction!).  In this sense, we humans teeter between moderate success and extinction.

What I found fascinating was his suggestion that evolution is at heart a pragmatic process. Our human evolutionary journey is less about the emergence of new and improved body parts than about tinkering with existing parts just enough to get us above the threshold of survival.  The body parts that no longer have a function remain aboard as vestigial organs; who knows when they may become useful down the evolutionary road?

For Pievani, the evolutionary “biggie” for us homo sapiens was when, after an unfathomable length of time swinging in trees and scampering on the ground on all fours, we began walking upright on our own two feet. However great this may have been for human kind, the transition to bipedalism caused all kinds of problems. “Human feet now have to tolerate high stress levels. Our neck, with that heavy, swinging bowling ball balanced on top, becomes a weak point. The abdomen, with all of its internal organs, is exposed to all sorts of trauma.”

In my view, Pievani’s use of the common head cold to illustrate evolutionary imperfection is classic, albeit gross:

After having digested Pievani’s treatise on imperfection I realize that what I considered to be human “imperfection” was no more than a trivial blip in the big picture of imperfections. What does it matter if I can’t cast a fly without tangling my line? At least some fish will be spared and able to continue on with their own evolutionary journey. Not having the fortitude to talk to our kids about sex certainly won’t lead to the extinction of humanity. And when I accidentally used salt instead of sugar when making waffles for house guests, life went on (even for those who politely ate the waffles without gagging).

So at the end of the day it appears that having a few imperfections here and there is not so bad and may even indicate that we are in harmony with the rhythm of the universe. I’m not sure what that means but when I figure it out I’ll let you know if that’s a good or bad thing.