73 Quotes by Carl Zimmer

Evolution has led to some populations of people being able to digest milk without much trouble when they’re adults as well.

When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.

The Europeans unwittingly brought a biological weapon with them that gave the invaders a brutal advantage over their opponents. With no immunity whatsoever to smallpox, Native Americans died in droves when they were exposed to the virus. In Central America, over 90 percent of the native population is believed to have died of smallpox in the decades following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.

Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.

Viruses don’t just make us sick. They can actually sometimes end up in our genomes.

To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. “How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself,” writes Michael Alkire, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, in the new Encyclopedia of Consciousness.

The problem is not that dolphins are dumber than we thought, but that our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own.

If you’re looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You’re just looking at a bunch of viruses.

Borna virus is not a retrovirus. It doesn’t actually insert its own genes into our cells. What it does is just hangs out near our DNA and uses some of the molecular machinery to copy itself.