David Quammen > Quotes

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
― David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

“Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“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.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“People come into our lives and then they go out again. The entropy law, as applied to human relations. Sometimes in their passing, though, they register an unimagined and far-reaching influence, as I suspect Hughes Rudd did upon me. There is no scientific way to discern such effects, but memory believes before knowing remembers. And the past lives coiled within the present, beyond sight, beyond revocation, lifting us up or weighting us down, sealed away--almost completely--behind walls of pearl.”
― David Quammen, The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature

“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”
― David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

“By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.”
― David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places

“In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“بعد أسبوع من موت آني " ابنة داروين" بينماالصورة لا تزال حاضرة في الذاكرة، كتب داروين مذكرة خاصة قصيرة تسجل القليل من مفاتنها، وعاداتها، وسماتها، ورقصاتها حوله بطول الممشى الرملي، وتدقيقها صعب الإرضاء، وحبها للأطفال الأصغر سنًا، وموهبتها الموسيقية، وحماسها للقواميش والخرائط . كتب داروين أنه فقد هو وايما "زوجته" متعة دارهما وأنيسة وحدتهما في عمرهما المتقدم. لا شك أن الفتاة الصغيرة كانت تدرك لأي مدى كانت محبوبة.
ثم ينهي داروين ما كتبه بقوله : "فلتحل عليها البركات"، وقد أسقط هذه المرة, على نحو مبهم .. ذكر اسم الرب !”
― David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution

“We should recognize that they reflect things that we’re doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“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.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders—and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist’s term for variousness of behavior is “heterogeneity,” and Dwyer’s models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease.

“If you hold mean transmission rate constant,” he told me, “just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate.” That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf.

An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse’s windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. “Any tiny little thing that people do,” Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, “is going to reduce infection rates.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as “a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled—but resourceful enough to have escaped and endured when the other birds didn’t. Or else she was lucky.
Maybe she had spent all her years in the Bambous Mountains along the southeastern coast, where the various forms of human-brought menace were slow to penetrate. Or she might have lurked in a creek drainage of the Black River Gorges. Time and trouble had finally caught up with her. Imagine that her last hatchling had been snarfed by a [invasive] feral pig. That her last fertile egg had been eaten by a [invasive] monkey. That her mate was dead, clubbed by a hungry Dutch sailor, and that she had no hope of finding another. During the past halfdozen years, longer than a bird could remember, she had not even set eyes on a member of her own species.
Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto death. But this one flesh-and-blood individual still lived. Imagine that she was thirty years old, or thirty-five, an ancient age for most sorts of bird but not impossible for a member of such a large-bodied species. She no longer ran, she waddled. Lately she was going blind. Her digestive system was balky. In the dark of an early morning in 1667, say, during a rainstorm, she took cover beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of one of the Black River cliffs. She drew her head down against her body, fluffed her feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery. She waited. She didn't know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is partitioned into eight segments, which serve as templates for eleven different proteins. In other words, they have eight discrete stretches of RNA coding, linked together like eight railroad cars, with eleven different deliverable cargoes. The eleven deliverables are the molecules that comprise the structure and functional machinery of the virus. They are what the genes make. Two of those molecules become spiky protuberances from the outer surface of the viral envelope: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Those two, recognizable by an immune system, and crucial for penetrating and exiting cells of a host, give the various subtypes of influenza A their definitive labels: H5N1, H1N1, and so on. The term “H5N1” indicates a virus featuring subtype 5 of the hemagglutinin protein combined with subtype 1 of the neuraminidase protein. Sixteen different kinds of hemagglutinin, plus nine kinds of neuraminidase, have been detected in the natural world. Hemagglutinin is the key that unlocks a cell membrane so that the virus can get in, and neuraminidase is the key for getting back out. Okay so far? Having absorbed this simple paragraph, you understand more about influenza than 99.9 percent of the people on Earth. Pat yourself on the back and get a flu shot in November. At”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“لم تكن إيما تشاركه اهتماماته الفكرية، لم تكن تشاركه ترفّعه عن الدين أو نظرته المادية للعالم، كانت لا تزال تعبد إلهًا مسيحيًا وتشعر بالقلق بشأن روح زوجها، أما هو فكان من ناحيته يحبها حبًا جمًا. لم يستطع التظاهر بأنه يصادق على معتقاداتها، أو يتقبل أعمق أشجانه (كفقدان ابنته آني) وأمراضه بروح من الإذعان التقي، كما كانت إيما تريده أن يفعل. لكنه كان يبجّل ما فيها من خير وكان حساسًا لمشاعرها. ظل أربعين عامًا يحتفظ في مكان ما وسط الحقائب والأوراق بذلك الخطاب الجاد الذي كتبته له قبيل زواجهما، عندما سمعت اعترافه بأفكاره الجامحة المهرطقة. كتبت في إصرار: "لا تظن أن هذا ليس من شأني، وأنه لا يحمل الكثير من الأهمية لي." كتبت له إيما أن هذا أمر له أهميته، وعارضت رأيه بحزم، لكن بحب. فكل ما يخصه يخصها هي أيضًا، وكتبت له قائلة: "سأكون أشد تعاسة لو اعتقدت أنه لا ينتمي أحدنا للآخر إلى الأبد." ومن وقتها ظلت على مر السنين على أملها في أن يكونا معًا إلى الأبد، في الحياة الآخرة، لكن دون أن تلقى أي تأكيد منه لهذا الأمل. لم يكن في استطاعة داروين إلا أن يتعاطف معها، أو يتجنب الموضوع. لم يكن من طبعه أن يكذب، لكنه في وقت ما خط ملحوظة في نهاية خطابها، عُثر عليها بين أوراقه الأخرى، قال فيها:

"عندما أموت، فلتعرفي أني كثيرًا ما قبّلت هذا الخطاب وبكيت.”
― David Quammen

“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.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.”
― David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places

“When a pathogen leaps from some nonhuman animal into a person, and succeeds there in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“The next day, William Lanney's much abused remains were carried in a coffin to the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was large. It included many of Lanney's shipmates, suggesting that the whaling profession in late-nineteenth-century Hobart was graced with a higher level of humanistic sensibility than the surgical profession.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Our findings highlight the critical need for health monitoring and identification of new, potentially zoonotic pathogens in wildlife populations, as a forecast measure for EIDs.” That sounds reasonable: Let’s keep an eye on wild creatures. As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we’re getting their diseases.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“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.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?”
― David Quammen, Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

“Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic