73 Quotes by Carl Zimmer

We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don’t know the full range of them. Maybe we’ve got flu virus inside of us. That’s a possibility. Maybe we’re part flu.

Everybody can digest milk when they’re little.

I wouldn’t be a very good hunter without these glasses. I’m not a very good hunter with these glasses, but I’d be even worse without them, so that would put a crimp in how many kids I could have, so all of these medical advances have at least in some parts of the world blunted natural selection.

And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the “Halle Berry” neuron responded to any picture of her, including one in which she was dressed as the masked Catwoman. Even the name Halle Berry triggered that neuron, which was silent at the sight of other actresses or their names.

Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons that responded to touching their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons in the brain respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change – reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

We’d be better prepared for these emergencies if they didn’t always come as such surprises. The next plague may start when yet another virus in some wild animal jumps into our species – a virus we might not yet even know about. To reduce that ignorance, scientists are surveying animals, searching for bits of genetic material from viruses. But because we live on a planet of viruses, that task is enormous.

When we see faces, we don’t just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.

It used to be thought that only a certain kind of virus could get into our genome and it’s called a retrovirus and that’s a virus that might be HIV for example.

They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents’ genes.