26 Quotes by Ed Yong

Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, the loss of wild spaces, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. Whether on coral reefs or in human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years.

The brutal contract of natural selection ensures that if one partner is unnecessary, it gets dumped.

There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.

I was struck by how different everything seemed with microbes in mind.

As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, “Animals might be evolution’s icing, but bacteria are really the cake.

Every one of us is a zoo in our own right – a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.

Much of modern medicine is built upon the foundations that antibiotics provide, and those foundations are now crumbling.

As we have seen, bacteria have ways of hacking into the nervous system.

We can compare the gut of a person with inflammatory bowel disease to a dying coral reef or a fallow field: a battered ecosystem where the balance of organisms has gone awry.