Rob Dunn > Quotes

“Science is full of egos and arrogance, but it is fuller of simple moments of pleasure at the joy of finding some gem of new knowledge, big or small. Such gems can be anyone’s.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Without their chloroplasts plants would be left like the rest of us, to eat what they find. Instead they hold out their green palms and catch light. If there is magic in the world, surely this is it: the descendants of tiny creatures in leaves, capable of ingesting the sun.”
― Rob Dunn

“Copernicus theorized that the Earth revolved around the sun, but it was not until he lay on his deathbed that he published anything regarding his discovery. He had largely kept it a secret, and a pretty good one as they go.* It would take Galileo to publicize and add nuance to Copernicus’s theory, but soon what was once heretical, that the Earth circled the sun, seemed obvious. Our place in the universe changed in a generation. The biological equivalent of the Copernican revolution would prove less simple. The biological world does not revolve around us, but we still tend to believe it does.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“The diversity-stability law, states that ecosystems that include more species are more stable through time... The law of dependence states that all species depend on other species. And we, as humans, are probably dependent on more species than any other species ever to exist. Meanwhile, just because we depend on other species does not mean nature depends on us. Long after we go extinct, the rules of life will continue.”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“We imagine we will colonize other planets, but we have barely probed this one. We have yet to find a lifeless place on Earth, and there are many places we have yet to check. The surface of Earth is covered in unstudied life. There are new species, unnamed species, living even in your own body. There is much here still. More than we now know, and more than we can yet imagine.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Our pets are good. They keep us happy and healthy. In exchange, we feed them. We pet them. We walk them more than we walk our own human children. In a biological world full of ambiguities, our pets are unambiguous, unambiguously good.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“The astronomers looked up through telescopes and saw the sky in new detail. This draper, Leeuwenhoek, looked down and saw everything else. He saw that the world was mostly microscopic. All along, the biological story had seemed to be about humans, but Leeuwenhoek would show that we were enormous and oversized—the Big Gulps of life. Linnaeus would much later show that there were more big species than had been imagined. But it was Leeuwenhoek who showed that most life was many times smaller than us. History produces unlikely revolutionaries. Leeuwenhoek was to be, without doubt, a revolutionary”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Of all the bacterial species in the world, for instance, fewer than fifty regularly cause disease. Just fifty. All the rest of the species are either benign or beneficial to humans, as are nearly all protists and even viruses”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“Naming species is not big science. It is like mapmaking or dictionary work and, on its own, of relatively little use. But it is the first step. It is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings. It is the simplest measure of the world. It is analogous to finding and naming the planets and the stars. Once named, it is another matter altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning. Every culture known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into knowledge and stories. Naming, and the learning associated with it, is part of what makes us human.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“The blind men before the elephant are thus, in their way, like astrobiologists or like scientists in any new field at the frontiers of knowledge, for whom it is clear that something is being revealed, but not very clear exactly what it is. In Saxe’s story, the men never figured out what the elephant was. But in science, sometimes we do.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Every surface; every bit of air; every bit of water in your home is alive. The average house has thousands of species.”
― Rob Dunn , Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“Most days you do not look at the stars, and in the same vein it is all too easy to ignore the other life we pass by. The species on our bodies are small, and the crust of the Earth is so far away.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“the key will prove to be (as it often is) valuing biodiversity, valuing the work that nature does oh-so-much-more-effectively than we do.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“Heaven and Earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. . . . How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and Earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other Earths.” TENG MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER OF THE 1200S”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Leeuwenhoek, Erwin, Woese, and others were at the fringes of their respective fields, the frontiers, to be generous. The same might be said to be true, as the Urbanos point out in their article, of Galileo. Those discoverers were vindicated, but their ideas started out at the very margins of believability. If we are to look for the next big discoveries, discoveries of entire biological realms, the place to look may not be the big, well-funded labs of well-respected scientists. The place to look may be to the very fringes of science.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Revelation can come in fits and starts.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“We were offered a deal by nature: if we gave up thousands of species of birds, plants, mammals, butterflies, and bees, in exchange we could have a handful of new kinds of mosquitoes and rats. It is a bad deal but one that so far we have accepted.”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“I know what I want my dust to say about me.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“Chance does, indeed, favor the prepared mind,”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“Those scientists, including Hooke, found previously unsuspected patterns in life’s interstices, patterns that suggested a world beyond that which was known.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“human beings suggests that the disease is an inherent component of human ageing and not associated with any specific diet or lifestyle.”15”
― Rob Dunn, The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery

“But there is also something else. When crows use their inventive intelligence to deal with novel conditions, they”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“If engineers were designing a heart from scratch, they would give it more coronary arteries for backup. They would arrange things differently. But evolution does not design from scratch; it built our hearts out of lungfish hearts, which were built out of earlier fish hearts, which were built out of sponges’ cardiovascular systems. Where”
― Rob Dunn, The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery

“It is surprising that we as a species have been as successful as we have despite our ignorance of the biological world and our biased perspective on its dimensions. Einstein said that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility"; in other words, what is incomprehensible is how much we comprehend. But I don't think that's quite right. I think that what is even more incomprehensible is that we have survived despite how little we have comprehended. We are like a driver who somehow gets down the road, despite being too short to see out the window, a little drunk and very fond of acceleration.”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“Nature can be ridiculous.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live

“In my experience, people who study climate change are planning for this last scenario in their own daily lives. At work, they write about the RCP2.6 path and how to get on it. At home, in their free time, they fight to get their communities on the RCP2.6 path. But when their day is over and they are sitting on the couch, they make choices that reflect their worry that we are probably on the RCP8.5 path. They look online at properties in, say, Canada or Sweden. They talk to real estate agents and ask questions like, "Does it have year-round flowing water?" They have conversations with their partners about which countries have stable governance and won't have malaria. With insider information and disposable income, they are preparing in advance to flee.”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“Eva Panagiotakopulu.”
― Rob Dunn, Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live