111 Quotes by David Quammen

Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.

Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best – and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.

Some of these viruses,” he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, “should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.

This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast – above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill – has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.

R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald.

How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.

This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.