We humans have been evolving for millions of years and — as any good biologist will tell you — in response to pressures in our environment, we are evolving still.

So how come our bodies are so flawed? Why does sharp vision so often elude us, for instance? Why do our backs hurt so frequently?

The theme of Alex Bezzerides' Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don't) is that we experience these and other embodied challenges — teeth that require braces, feet that acquire bunions, knees that blow out — not despite of evolution, but because of it. We are animals, and animals' early evolution in the ocean, and our primate lineage's transition from the trees to the ground, continue to affect how our bodies function and break down even today.

A biologist at Lewis-Clark State College who specializes in anatomy and evolution, Bezzerides has written a fantastic, informative book, a home run on his first try (he makes a point of noting his first-time author status in the Acknowledgments). Never did I expect to praise prose like, "The human foot... is made up of a whole gob of bones" but Bezzerides makes it work. He never condescends to his readers. Instead he mixes the technical anatomical stuff we need to know with vivid examples and humorous phrases.

We can grasp the main idea Bezzerides wants to get across by focusing on eyes and backs.