Tingis magazine reviews "Imperfection"
In the magazine Tingis Anouar Majid writes a review of Imperfection, the American edition of Imperfezione.
Can we ever talk about evolution when we know, as the Italian biologist Telmo Pievani tells us in Imperfection: A Natural History, that human beings are shoddily made creatures, reservoirs of long discarded and dormant genes, trolling the planet earth like zombies that have survived the cataclysmic events of vanished times? Our makeshift bodies, stitched together from dead and living genes, need a more semantically correct description. But then our inability to describe our condition correctly is, paradoxically, one of the expressions of our flawed nature. Human language, Pievani says, is “the source of countless and tiresome misunderstandings, arbitrary associations between words and meanings, vague generalizations, lexical ambiguities, and semantic incongruences as well as all manner of idiosyncratic irregularities. Besides wonderful theatrical plays, these imperfections have provoked divorces, broken friendships, and wars.”