Carl Zimmer > Quotes

“In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.”
― Carl Zimmer

“Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antibiotic that kills bacteria: because Plasmodium has a former bacterium inside it doing some vital business.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.”
― Carl Zimmer, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea

“The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.”
― Carl Zimmer, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed

“Intelligence is far from blood types. While test scores are unquestionably heritable, their heritability is not 100 percent. It sits instead somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities. While identical twins often end up with similar test scores, sometimes they don’t. If you get average scores on intelligence tests, it’s entirely possible your children may turn out to be geniuses. And if you’re a genius, you should be smart enough to recognize your children may not follow suit. Intelligence is not a thing to will to your descendants like a crown.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.”
― Carl Zimmer, At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea

“The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?”
― carl zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“The question of when life begins is answered according to the purposes for which we ask it.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents’ genes.”
― Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

“At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the song-producing region of the bird’s brain. The bird instantly stopped singing.”
― Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

“It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.”
― Carl Zimmer, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life

“Based on the number of viruses she found in her samples, Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“When we see faces, we don’t just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.”
― Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

“Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction,” Dobzhansky wrote. “It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“It may be hard to imagine a world before antibiotics, but now we must imagine a world where antibiotics are not the only weapon we use against bacteria. And now, ninety years after Herelle first encountered bacteriophages, these viruses may finally be ready to become a part of modern medicine.”
― Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

“It was a biochemical Jackson Pollock: a field of strings, tangles, loops.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind