Fire and Knowledge

At the Tambopata Reserve, Terry Erwin used a bug bomb to collect all the insects from a single leguminous tree in the rain forest. I identified the ants in his sample and found 43 species in 26 genera, approximately equal to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 198

The immense diversity of the insects and flowering plants combined is no accident. The two empires are united by intricate symbioses. The insects consume every anatomical part of the plants, while dwelling on them in every nook and cranny. A large fraction of the plant species depend on insects for pollination and reproduction. Ultimately they owe them their very lives, because insects turn the soil around their roots and decompose dead issue into nutrients required for continued growth.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction around the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and other terrestrial habitats of the world…. The land would return to approximately its condition in early Paleozoic times, covered by mats of recumbent wind-pollinated vegetation, sprinkled with clumps of small trees and bushes here and there, largely devoid of animal life.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 133

It turns out that being a stepchild is the strongest risk factor for child abuse yet found. And a child is 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a stepparent than by a biological parent.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 280-281

Almost as soon as [HIV] starts multiplying, our immune system starts recognizing the infected white blood cells and destroying them, wiping out the viruses in the process. But despite the immune system’s ability to kill HIV by the billions every day, HIV can survive these attacks for years. The secret to its longevity is its ability to evolve. The enzymes that HIV uses to make new copies of its genes are very sloppy, making one or two mistakes on average every time they duplicate the virus’s genome. Among the many mutants that spring up, a few strains will turn out to be hard for the immune system to recognize. Because HIV replicates so quickly, these resistant viruses quickly become the dominate strains in a person’s body. It takes time for our immune system to shift its attack toward the new strain, and once it does, the viruses evolve even newer forms that escape the immune system yet again.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 218

The greatest possibility of evil in self-medication is the use of too-small doses, so that, instead of clearing up the infection, the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out which can be passed on to other individuals and perhaps from there to others until they reach someone who … penicillin cannot save.

In such a case the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted.

–Sir Alexander Fleming (1881–1955), the discoverer of penicillin. Quoted in Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 215

I spent a lot of time looking at the science of nutrition, and learned pretty quickly there’s less there than meets the eye, and that the scientists really haven’t figured out that much about food. Letting them tell us how to eat is probably not a very good idea, and indeed the culture — which is to say tradition and our ancestors — has more to teach us about how to eat well than science does.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.

There are 10 billion viruses in every quart of seawater.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 213

It’s easy to pretend that humans are the champions of the evolutionary race, that through some kind of superiority we have won Earth for ourselves. But in fact whatever successes we enjoy depends on the balance between ourselves and the plants, animals, fungi, protozoa, and bacteria with which we have been coevolving. If anything, we are the most coevolved species that has ever existed, and depend more than any other species on the web of life.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 209