Ed Yong > Quotes

“It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“The majesty of nature is not restricted to canyons and mountains. It can be found in the wilds of perception--the sensory spaces that lie outside our Umwelt and within those of other animals. To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity and the sacred in the mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden, where bees take the measure of a flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational melodies through the stems of plants, and birds behold the hidden palates of rurples and grurples...Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor and to protect.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“A scientist's data are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of our own Umwelt corral our ability to understand the Umwelten of others.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of realities fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions: frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Each animal is an ecosystem with legs,” says John Rawls.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“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.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these things either, but we are the only animal that can try.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, "Animals might be evolution's icing, but bacteria are really the cake.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a nurturing response.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“The brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii is another puppetmaster. It can only sexually reproduce in a cat; if it gets into a rat, it suppresses the rodent’s natural fear of cat odours and replaces it with something more like sexual attraction. The rodent scurries towards nearby cats, with fatal results, and T. gondii gets to complete its life cycle.50 The”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Let’s pause to note how peculiar this all is. The traditional view of the immune system is full of military metaphors and antagonistic lingo. We see it as a defence force that discriminates self (our own cells) from non-self (microbes and everything else), and eradicates the latter. But now we see that microbes craft and tune our immune system in the first place! Consider”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. Like the occupants of our imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it’s easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they’d be in discomfort because we’d be in discomfort. But their senses are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn’t distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don’t mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn’t bother them, anyway.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“The quote is often taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural. I see it rather as a call to better understand the natural. Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“These changes are all fundamentally Darwinian. This point is worth repeating: taking any fast or instant evolutionary shifts as a refutation of the slow, gradual changes we associate with Darwin's vision is a fatal mistake because these quick shifts are still powered by gradualism. The woodrats might have been able to resist creosote by picking up the right bacteria, but those strains had to evolve the ability to break the insecticide on their own. Form their perspective, evolution proceeded through the usual stepwise way; from the host's perspective, everything happened in a flash. That is the power of symbiosis: it allows gradual mutations in microbes to produce instant mutations in hosts. We can let bacteria do the slow work for us, and then quickly change ourselves by associating with them. And if these alliances are beneficial enough, they can spread with blinding speed.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“And the most extreme examples of this mutually assured success can be found in the deep oceans, where some microbes supplement their hosts to such a degree that the animals can eat the most impoverished diets of all – nothing. In”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“We now know that gut microbes are part of this axis, in both directions. Since the 1970s, a trickle of studies have shown that any kind of stress – starvation, sleeplessness, being separated from one’s mother, the sudden arrival of an aggressive individual, uncomfortable temperatures, overcrowding, even loud noises – can change a mouse’s gut microbiome. The opposite is also true: the microbiome can affect a host’s behaviour, including its social attitudes and its ability to deal with stress.40”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“And thanks to the unfortunate persistence of dualism—the outdated belief that the mind and body are separate—people often equate subjective with woolly, and psychological with imagined.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Much of modern medicine is built upon the foundations that antibiotics provide, and those foundations are now crumbling.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“The mere presence of a guitar in someone’s bedroom doesn’t make them Slash.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“But personal responsibility cannot compensate for societal irresponsibility. To truly make a dent in sensory pollution, bigger steps are needed.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us