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The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today
Biologist Rob Dunn reveals the crucial influence that other species have upon our health, our well-being, and our world in The Wild Life of Our Bodies through the hidden truths of nature and codependence. Dunn illuminates the nuanced, often imperceptible relationships that exist between homo sapiens and other species, relationships that underpin humanity’s ability to thrive and prosper in every circumstance.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 21, 2011
261 people are currently reading
2494 people want to read
About the author
Rob Dunn
17 books146 followersRobert Dunn is a biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University.
He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.
Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.
Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.
{more at Wikipedia}
He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.
Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.
Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.
{more at Wikipedia}
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
September 18, 2022
Musings. Like all evolutionary books, this one puts us in our place, just one of the life forms interdependent on each other. When I was young and learning about atoms and molecules, the solar system seemed to me to be a gigantic atom. And I wondered about size. We can construct the finest nets and yet neutrinos are so small they can pass through it with ease.
So I wondered if there were many worlds, that we lived on our atom called Solar System and thought we were big but really to the gigantic systems, the bigger atoms, and biggest atoms, and the living creatures that inhabited the planets that whirled around them, we could fit on the head of one of their pins. Just as atoms could on one of ours. Size is all. If you are tiny, skin pores look like entrances. If you are gigantic you don't even see the little things excavating your skin as explorers might through caves.
And all that musing is kind of true. Our bodies are homes to vast numbers of microbes and bacteria that if they could think that way might think of us as vast as the Milky Way.
Others live happily in our guts helping us digest food, a symbiotic relationship. Still others prevent us from getting certain diseases and we harvest them from other people if we lose our own, think of CDiff and faecal implants (ok don't think too much on those). We are all interdependent on each other.
And we have all been shaped by evolution, we have evolved together into a state of homeostatis, happiness, until an intruder comes calling. But we can defend ourselves, tiny cells in our blood are organised into chemical armies and wage wars against them, virus, bacteria or parasite. And all of these viruses, bacteria or parasites might be home to even smaller living things. "Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum."
That is sort of what the book is about, but it's more concrete with lots of anecdotes, a little weak on the science, but still a good book. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get round to a review because I don't know what to say. And sometimes what I have to say is just the thoughts the book brings to my head, and are by no means a review at all. Which is ok, there are plenty of other more en pointe reviews to check out.
So I wondered if there were many worlds, that we lived on our atom called Solar System and thought we were big but really to the gigantic systems, the bigger atoms, and biggest atoms, and the living creatures that inhabited the planets that whirled around them, we could fit on the head of one of their pins. Just as atoms could on one of ours. Size is all. If you are tiny, skin pores look like entrances. If you are gigantic you don't even see the little things excavating your skin as explorers might through caves.
And all that musing is kind of true. Our bodies are homes to vast numbers of microbes and bacteria that if they could think that way might think of us as vast as the Milky Way.
Others live happily in our guts helping us digest food, a symbiotic relationship. Still others prevent us from getting certain diseases and we harvest them from other people if we lose our own, think of CDiff and faecal implants (ok don't think too much on those). We are all interdependent on each other.
And we have all been shaped by evolution, we have evolved together into a state of homeostatis, happiness, until an intruder comes calling. But we can defend ourselves, tiny cells in our blood are organised into chemical armies and wage wars against them, virus, bacteria or parasite. And all of these viruses, bacteria or parasites might be home to even smaller living things. "Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum."
That is sort of what the book is about, but it's more concrete with lots of anecdotes, a little weak on the science, but still a good book. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get round to a review because I don't know what to say. And sometimes what I have to say is just the thoughts the book brings to my head, and are by no means a review at all. Which is ok, there are plenty of other more en pointe reviews to check out.
February 23, 2012
The subject matter of this book is extremely interesting. Unfortunately, the author dumbed down his text to the level of a cable channel documentary so that you won't learn very much actual science from reading the book.
He gives many pages to long, detailed accounts of human interest anecdotes that don't contribute anything to our understanding of his topic--for example, the discovery of an early hominid fossil or one patient's trip to Mexico to get a treatment based on a theory he discusses. The fossil doesn't have anything to do with parasitology and the author has no idea whether the patient's treatment helped in any way. The pages given to describing the search for the treatment seemed to me to be filler.
Or, more likely, what happens when you turn the script for a made-for-TV documentary into a book. The author seems to think his readers are too dumb to have anything described in terms that would explain the actual science involved and that our only interest is in anecdotal material of the kind that is accompanied by woo-woo music.
Too bad. Good germs, Bad Germs, an excellent book published some years ago did a much better job of exploring this topic. I had hoped to learn of developments since that book came out, but I'm halfway through this book and I keep expecting the text to be interrupted by a commercial for some product medicare will pay for, or a company claiming it can help me fend off the IRS.
NOTE: I finished this book and dropped the rating a star as the second half was more vague and inane than the first. There was enough real material here for a brief magazine article. As a book it's a waste of time unless you don't know anything about ecology.
He gives many pages to long, detailed accounts of human interest anecdotes that don't contribute anything to our understanding of his topic--for example, the discovery of an early hominid fossil or one patient's trip to Mexico to get a treatment based on a theory he discusses. The fossil doesn't have anything to do with parasitology and the author has no idea whether the patient's treatment helped in any way. The pages given to describing the search for the treatment seemed to me to be filler.
Or, more likely, what happens when you turn the script for a made-for-TV documentary into a book. The author seems to think his readers are too dumb to have anything described in terms that would explain the actual science involved and that our only interest is in anecdotal material of the kind that is accompanied by woo-woo music.
Too bad. Good germs, Bad Germs, an excellent book published some years ago did a much better job of exploring this topic. I had hoped to learn of developments since that book came out, but I'm halfway through this book and I keep expecting the text to be interrupted by a commercial for some product medicare will pay for, or a company claiming it can help me fend off the IRS.
NOTE: I finished this book and dropped the rating a star as the second half was more vague and inane than the first. There was enough real material here for a brief magazine article. As a book it's a waste of time unless you don't know anything about ecology.
June 13, 2018
This book examines what are lives are like without the various species we evolved with. In a lot of cases we face issues we never had to face with them. There are plenty of things to think about when reading this book.
After an introduction in part one, part two explores why we might be afflicted with Crohn's Disease and other auto-immune diseases in the developed world, but not in other parts of the world. The answer very well might be that we in the modern world with its cleanliness and health care are missing the worms that infect the rest less fortunate part of the world. Less fortunate in the sense that they live without what we have come to rely on and aspect. If we factor in their lack of Crohn's Disease and its like, the matter might not seem so clear. One scientist wondered about our lack of worms, and if it could be responsible for these diseases. In an actual clinical trial Crohn's patient were given a benign species of hookworms, and most of those given the worms either improved or went in to remission. The reason that auto-immune diseases are prevalent might be that without the worms in our bodies for the immune system to fight it attacks our own bodies. Of course, there is a lot more research needed to provide that direct link. It's possible that there could be alternative explanations, or it might be only a part of the explanation.
The next part covers the trillions of bacterica that live in and on us. Research has shown that a lot of the bacteria in our guts are beneficial. These bacteria help us digest fiber and play a role in our immune system. Other research has shown a correlation between low fiber diets and colon cancer. The appendix is discussed as being a beneficial organ, long thought to be a relic and useless. Studies have shown that a particular antibody we have actually benefits good bacteria in our appendix. In the developing world where the incidence of appendicitis is rare the appendix replenishes their guts with the good bacteria that live in the appendix after a bout with common diarrheal diseases. Without the need to repopulate our guts in the developed world the appendix can become blotted and rupture, sending the bacteria into the body cavity where it can have deadly consequences. Again more research is needed to improve our understanding of our interaction with the bacteria that could be considered a part of us.
Part four covers how domestication of plants and animals have changed us. For me there was not much of interest in this part, except for lactose intolerence was reverse in cultures that domesticated cows and other milk producing species.
The subject of part five is the relationship we had and now have with predators. There is a theory that poisonous snakes are responsible for our excellent color vision. In other primates, the better the vision, the more poisonous snakes were in the environment. There are other explanations for color vision, such as the ability to spot nutritious fruits. The modern plague of anxiety disorders may involve a misdirection of fear from predators we used to come across with some frequency.
In part six the creatures that live on or did live on us are discussed. There is a theory that our hairlessness, which evolved in relation to lice, ticks, and other bugs that dine on our blood, has led to xenophobia. This theory could be a stretch, but is plausaible. Our hairlessness has also led to our being prone to skin cancers.
The final part is on how we could make are city environments more like those we evolved in. Massive rooftop gardens and whole vacant buildings acting as natural cliff environments, which are thought to be part of our evolutionary environment. This section I view as pie in the sky type thinking. Although I believe we need people to dream big, because good things have often come with those dreams and people.
The book as a whole is pretty good. It was for the most part interesting throughout. I like the fact that the author presents experiments that support the various theories proposed in the book. The author also did not actually do any of the experiments or propose any of the theories explained in the book. But, like a good scientist he assesses the different theories and their weaknesses, which all of them basically had.
I would recommend the book for those interest in our evolution with other species in our environments, and what might be the result of not having them in our environment anymore. Like I said the author is careful in presenting the facts, based on experiments, and the proposed theories. This should be appreciated by readers who value honesty by an author in presenting hers or his ideas. I think it is incumbent upon an author to present known and possible problems with his or hers ideas being presented.
After an introduction in part one, part two explores why we might be afflicted with Crohn's Disease and other auto-immune diseases in the developed world, but not in other parts of the world. The answer very well might be that we in the modern world with its cleanliness and health care are missing the worms that infect the rest less fortunate part of the world. Less fortunate in the sense that they live without what we have come to rely on and aspect. If we factor in their lack of Crohn's Disease and its like, the matter might not seem so clear. One scientist wondered about our lack of worms, and if it could be responsible for these diseases. In an actual clinical trial Crohn's patient were given a benign species of hookworms, and most of those given the worms either improved or went in to remission. The reason that auto-immune diseases are prevalent might be that without the worms in our bodies for the immune system to fight it attacks our own bodies. Of course, there is a lot more research needed to provide that direct link. It's possible that there could be alternative explanations, or it might be only a part of the explanation.
The next part covers the trillions of bacterica that live in and on us. Research has shown that a lot of the bacteria in our guts are beneficial. These bacteria help us digest fiber and play a role in our immune system. Other research has shown a correlation between low fiber diets and colon cancer. The appendix is discussed as being a beneficial organ, long thought to be a relic and useless. Studies have shown that a particular antibody we have actually benefits good bacteria in our appendix. In the developing world where the incidence of appendicitis is rare the appendix replenishes their guts with the good bacteria that live in the appendix after a bout with common diarrheal diseases. Without the need to repopulate our guts in the developed world the appendix can become blotted and rupture, sending the bacteria into the body cavity where it can have deadly consequences. Again more research is needed to improve our understanding of our interaction with the bacteria that could be considered a part of us.
Part four covers how domestication of plants and animals have changed us. For me there was not much of interest in this part, except for lactose intolerence was reverse in cultures that domesticated cows and other milk producing species.
The subject of part five is the relationship we had and now have with predators. There is a theory that poisonous snakes are responsible for our excellent color vision. In other primates, the better the vision, the more poisonous snakes were in the environment. There are other explanations for color vision, such as the ability to spot nutritious fruits. The modern plague of anxiety disorders may involve a misdirection of fear from predators we used to come across with some frequency.
In part six the creatures that live on or did live on us are discussed. There is a theory that our hairlessness, which evolved in relation to lice, ticks, and other bugs that dine on our blood, has led to xenophobia. This theory could be a stretch, but is plausaible. Our hairlessness has also led to our being prone to skin cancers.
The final part is on how we could make are city environments more like those we evolved in. Massive rooftop gardens and whole vacant buildings acting as natural cliff environments, which are thought to be part of our evolutionary environment. This section I view as pie in the sky type thinking. Although I believe we need people to dream big, because good things have often come with those dreams and people.
The book as a whole is pretty good. It was for the most part interesting throughout. I like the fact that the author presents experiments that support the various theories proposed in the book. The author also did not actually do any of the experiments or propose any of the theories explained in the book. But, like a good scientist he assesses the different theories and their weaknesses, which all of them basically had.
I would recommend the book for those interest in our evolution with other species in our environments, and what might be the result of not having them in our environment anymore. Like I said the author is careful in presenting the facts, based on experiments, and the proposed theories. This should be appreciated by readers who value honesty by an author in presenting hers or his ideas. I think it is incumbent upon an author to present known and possible problems with his or hers ideas being presented.
November 20, 2011
Joel Weinstock was flying somewhere over New York or Pennsylvania when he got his crazy idea. He had been studying intestinal parasites. That day he began reading about Crohn's Disease. Why, he wondered, did people who had intestinal worms not have Crohn's and people who had Crohn's never have intestinal parasites? Could it be that worms prevented Crohn's? Naw. Impossible.
But he couldn't get the idea out of his head. In the 1940s half of American children had worms. In 1980 there were something like 10 times more people with Crohn's than in 1940. This is a pretty strong correlation. Weinstock decided to see what happened when he gave whip worm eggs to people with inflammatory intestinal disease.
In March of 1999 29 well-informed and consenting patients were given Gatorade laced with whipworm eggs. And by week 24 of the study all but one of the patients were doing better and 22 of the remaining 25 (some, understandably, dropped out of the study) were in remission. These were patients with serious and untreatable Crohn's. And having worms made them healthier.
Deborah Wade had an exceedingly bad case of Crohn's disease. She read about Weinstock's experiment and in 2007 she decided she wanted to try the worm treatment. So she found someone (a non-MD in an unlicensed Mexican clinic) who would give her a drink of worms. "The endeavor felt more like adopting a pet than modern medicine - a long, translucent, sucker-mouthed companion animal."
Deborah Wade is not cured, but she is better. And so are other people with autoimmune diseases who have been treated with worms. Why would "rewilding" your body, as the author calls it, keep autoimmunie disease under control? How does it work? They aren't really sure but it has something to do with cells produced by chronic worm infestation that help to tamp down the excessive reactions of Lupus and asthma and Crohn's.
This is just one of the dozens of puzzling and sometimes alarming stories Rob Dunn tells in his amusing book about The Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. The author offers some convincing explanations for how cows domesticated humans, how lice and fleas made us naked, and the exceedingly useful role of our appendix.
Most of us who are primarily readers of fiction, ex-English majors, literature junkies, are distressingly ignorant about science. This makes reading popular science written by people like Dunn and Natalie Angier so entertaining. So much is going on out there in the world of botany and astronomy and ecology. Books like The Wild Life of Our Bodies begin to give us a hint of how much we are missing.
Read Rob Dunn's blog here: http://www.yourwildlife.org/
But he couldn't get the idea out of his head. In the 1940s half of American children had worms. In 1980 there were something like 10 times more people with Crohn's than in 1940. This is a pretty strong correlation. Weinstock decided to see what happened when he gave whip worm eggs to people with inflammatory intestinal disease.
In March of 1999 29 well-informed and consenting patients were given Gatorade laced with whipworm eggs. And by week 24 of the study all but one of the patients were doing better and 22 of the remaining 25 (some, understandably, dropped out of the study) were in remission. These were patients with serious and untreatable Crohn's. And having worms made them healthier.
Deborah Wade had an exceedingly bad case of Crohn's disease. She read about Weinstock's experiment and in 2007 she decided she wanted to try the worm treatment. So she found someone (a non-MD in an unlicensed Mexican clinic) who would give her a drink of worms. "The endeavor felt more like adopting a pet than modern medicine - a long, translucent, sucker-mouthed companion animal."
Deborah Wade is not cured, but she is better. And so are other people with autoimmune diseases who have been treated with worms. Why would "rewilding" your body, as the author calls it, keep autoimmunie disease under control? How does it work? They aren't really sure but it has something to do with cells produced by chronic worm infestation that help to tamp down the excessive reactions of Lupus and asthma and Crohn's.
This is just one of the dozens of puzzling and sometimes alarming stories Rob Dunn tells in his amusing book about The Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. The author offers some convincing explanations for how cows domesticated humans, how lice and fleas made us naked, and the exceedingly useful role of our appendix.
Most of us who are primarily readers of fiction, ex-English majors, literature junkies, are distressingly ignorant about science. This makes reading popular science written by people like Dunn and Natalie Angier so entertaining. So much is going on out there in the world of botany and astronomy and ecology. Books like The Wild Life of Our Bodies begin to give us a hint of how much we are missing.
Read Rob Dunn's blog here: http://www.yourwildlife.org/
January 18, 2012
I liked this book, but as a microbiologist, I found the science behind the assertions to be either dumbed down or not explained fully. For example, in the case of intestinal worms improving auto-immune diseases, it would have been nice to see any evidence of a mechanism behind this phenomenon, rather than vague hand-waving about the immune system chasing things that aren't there. I did like many of the ideas in the book, but I found the book to have an overall negative tone that was distracting.
July 2, 2012
Started out as notable, scientific, informative, disgustingly fun. What is the appendix for? Can intestinal parasites cure us of bowel diseases? And more. But as it goes, the writing is inconsistent at best. Instead of presenting interesting scientific findings about our bodies, Dunn puts more and more effort into first the secret life of scientists (how an anthropologist's new idea unraveled as she made eggs for breakfast!), and then into thought experiments that are not at all fleshed out, either because introduced ideas don't have enough evidence to support them, or because Dunn got lazy. Fun and interesting at times, and certainly great for dinnertime conversation, but I would vastly recommend Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer over this one.
November 27, 2012
I didn't actually finish the book, so take my review with the appropriate grains of salt. This is a book about one of the most fascinating topics imaginable, and it's written in such a cutesy, condescending, dumbed-down, frivolous way that it's almost unbearable to read.
In fact I'd call it irresponsibly frivolous in some parts, such as the "upbeat" story of the guy who just *had* to try infecting himself with parasitic worms in an attempt to treat his IBS, and the brave and plucky individuals who opened illegal clinics in Mexico to offer parasite treatments. I know just enough about the topic to know that this is an extremely interesting line of inquiry in the treatment of autoimmune diseases, and not scientifically wacko per se - however, such things *become* wacko at the moment that people decide to set up shop and offer these treatments based on extremely preliminary research, and it's grossly immoral to write about this kind of thing in such a credulous way without accurately portraying the limits of current knowledge.
I would really like to read a GOOD book on this topic, but this one isn't it.
In fact I'd call it irresponsibly frivolous in some parts, such as the "upbeat" story of the guy who just *had* to try infecting himself with parasitic worms in an attempt to treat his IBS, and the brave and plucky individuals who opened illegal clinics in Mexico to offer parasite treatments. I know just enough about the topic to know that this is an extremely interesting line of inquiry in the treatment of autoimmune diseases, and not scientifically wacko per se - however, such things *become* wacko at the moment that people decide to set up shop and offer these treatments based on extremely preliminary research, and it's grossly immoral to write about this kind of thing in such a credulous way without accurately portraying the limits of current knowledge.
I would really like to read a GOOD book on this topic, but this one isn't it.
January 21, 2012
Humans like to think of themselves as different from other living things. Germs and parasites are bad: we should eliminate them. After all, it's what our immune system does. In this book, Dunn argues quite convincingly that this is a destructive view. Species don't evolve in isolation of other species - predators and their prey engage in an evolutionary arms race (which explains, for example, why mollusks have thicker shells in the Pacific as compared to the Atlantic), symbiosis is found all over (for example, our immune system encourages the creation of biofilms), perhaps why tapeworms are proving to be an effective method of controlling certain autoimmune disorders, and why a large number of "pest" species (rats, pigeons, dandelions, bedbugs, etc) come from narrow ecological niches (cliffs and caves).
When Dunn discusses human evolution and its impact on what we currently are, he doesn't draw the line that I automatically drew: that of being human. Of course, this is an arbitrary line, and I drew it because of my own bias of thinking of humans as being different from other living things. Like other old-world primates, our eyes see colors and we are good at spotting certain shapes, the latter being important in our use of writing for communication. Our long history of being prey (going way before your ancestors lost their tails) still has an impact on how we live - and amuse ourselves.
Dunn also opened my eyes on how our myths diverge from what probably happened. For example, how agriculture and domestication of cattle were likely acts of desperation. (I'd love to see Dunn and Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham collaborate on applying Dunn's approach of coevolution to the emergence of cooking). I was reading this part while walking to the metro on my morning commute to NSF: this section made me stop to think. I looked around at the people around me - I was standing in front of the National Geographic building - and saw the "obesity epidemic" around me in a much different light. (A paragraph or so later, Dunn touched on this topic, so all I had done was anticipate him).
The author Rob Dunn is an associate professor in the Department of Biology at NC State. Given the state of science in the popular mind of the United States, scientists like Rob are wonderful - not only does he have the ability to explain complex ideas in a clear manner, he actively enlists the public to join him in his research. Spend some time at the wildlife blog of his lab. (Rob seems like a natural for TED, and I was surprised to see he was not one of the speakers, but the way he is popularizing his part of science can have much broader impact than what TED offers). I read his 2004 Science paper "Species Coextinctions and the Biodiversity Crisis" - the paper that first attempted to estimate the rate of coextinction of species - which shows his interest in this topic goes back quite far.
When Dunn discusses human evolution and its impact on what we currently are, he doesn't draw the line that I automatically drew: that of being human. Of course, this is an arbitrary line, and I drew it because of my own bias of thinking of humans as being different from other living things. Like other old-world primates, our eyes see colors and we are good at spotting certain shapes, the latter being important in our use of writing for communication. Our long history of being prey (going way before your ancestors lost their tails) still has an impact on how we live - and amuse ourselves.
Dunn also opened my eyes on how our myths diverge from what probably happened. For example, how agriculture and domestication of cattle were likely acts of desperation. (I'd love to see Dunn and Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham collaborate on applying Dunn's approach of coevolution to the emergence of cooking). I was reading this part while walking to the metro on my morning commute to NSF: this section made me stop to think. I looked around at the people around me - I was standing in front of the National Geographic building - and saw the "obesity epidemic" around me in a much different light. (A paragraph or so later, Dunn touched on this topic, so all I had done was anticipate him).
The author Rob Dunn is an associate professor in the Department of Biology at NC State. Given the state of science in the popular mind of the United States, scientists like Rob are wonderful - not only does he have the ability to explain complex ideas in a clear manner, he actively enlists the public to join him in his research. Spend some time at the wildlife blog of his lab. (Rob seems like a natural for TED, and I was surprised to see he was not one of the speakers, but the way he is popularizing his part of science can have much broader impact than what TED offers). I read his 2004 Science paper "Species Coextinctions and the Biodiversity Crisis" - the paper that first attempted to estimate the rate of coextinction of species - which shows his interest in this topic goes back quite far.
November 22, 2021
Entertaining and informative look at our bodies and how we move in the world. Well written so that lay folks as well as health care workers and scientists can listen(or read) and not get bored.
September 17, 2011
Other reviews mirror many of my thoughts - I really wished the final chapter was fleshed out into two or more chapters. And for some reason I had this idea that the author was going to promote the idea of having our cities be wild to the extent that predators would be let loose there. I kept hoping to read about that somewhere in the last chapter, but I must have missed it.
Don't get me wrong, the other stuff about the evolution of mankind from H&G to Agricultural to our post-agricultural age; yet all the while living with all the rest of nature around us. Yet now we are trying to eradicate all that nature. However, what we have done is eradicate the beneficial parts of nature, leaving only the hardiest of pests behind - rats, cockroaches, bedbugs to name a few.
Another really cool bit was that humans are a cliff-dwelling species, so we have created huge ecologies of cliffs (cities) - and that many many of the species joining us in these modern cliff ecologies are also originally cliff creatures too - Dandelions, Norway rats, German cockroaches bedbugs, pigeons, starlings, earthworms, and even some domesticated species like goats, guinea pigs, almonds, carrots, and wheat. This was in the final chapter - I wanted to hear more of this stuff too.
Finally, I'll end this with a link to a web page that has some designs for urban farms, 3-D farms.
http://weburbanist.com/2008/03/30/5-u...
Don't get me wrong, the other stuff about the evolution of mankind from H&G to Agricultural to our post-agricultural age; yet all the while living with all the rest of nature around us. Yet now we are trying to eradicate all that nature. However, what we have done is eradicate the beneficial parts of nature, leaving only the hardiest of pests behind - rats, cockroaches, bedbugs to name a few.
Another really cool bit was that humans are a cliff-dwelling species, so we have created huge ecologies of cliffs (cities) - and that many many of the species joining us in these modern cliff ecologies are also originally cliff creatures too - Dandelions, Norway rats, German cockroaches bedbugs, pigeons, starlings, earthworms, and even some domesticated species like goats, guinea pigs, almonds, carrots, and wheat. This was in the final chapter - I wanted to hear more of this stuff too.
Finally, I'll end this with a link to a web page that has some designs for urban farms, 3-D farms.
http://weburbanist.com/2008/03/30/5-u...
July 26, 2011
This book packed such a knowledge punch I am somewhat at a loss for words even days after reading the last page. One of the things I admired most while reading this book was how science was at the forefront – research, evolution and the beginning of mankind in forms that we would hardly recognize now. This book covers a range of topics from the lack of worms in our guts, to how STD’s have changed since we have become pro-less hair. Every page was fascinating and full of ideas that let your mind dance through how people have become the people we have become.
Aside from going to Mexico to willingly be injected with a worm, my favorite portion of the book covered the change from gatherers to hunters and then to farmers. I found this most fascinating because it really changed the way our entire future forever. We became less nomadic – creating the food instead of following after it. It was at first hard to realize the impact of this one change but as the author further writes of its weight I began to feel it myself. This changed the landscape of animals, plants, people and the Earth.
This is a powerful book that is worth reading, if nothing else for the insight into how our actions have impacted everything around us, and our own bodies.
Aside from going to Mexico to willingly be injected with a worm, my favorite portion of the book covered the change from gatherers to hunters and then to farmers. I found this most fascinating because it really changed the way our entire future forever. We became less nomadic – creating the food instead of following after it. It was at first hard to realize the impact of this one change but as the author further writes of its weight I began to feel it myself. This changed the landscape of animals, plants, people and the Earth.
This is a powerful book that is worth reading, if nothing else for the insight into how our actions have impacted everything around us, and our own bodies.
April 17, 2012
This book is, in essence, about what it means to be human: "...our bodies and lives only make sense in the context of other species."
It completely blew me away. (I am going to buy it next time I'm at Powell's, and I'm a die-hard library user.)
Unlike Dunn's other book (_Every Living Thing_), which I also loved, you do not have to be a biologist or even a scientist to maximize your enjoyment here. _The Wild Life_ is much more accessible to the layperson. I'm recommending it to pretty much everyone. (Yes, even you.) There are lots of amazing new ideas here, and new research for those of you that don't keep up with the latest (like, our appendix actually has a purpose!)
I love Dunn's writing style. He roams seemingly all over, and you're like "dude where are you going with this" but he brings the topics neatly back to his original point, so you don't feel lost for long. I picture him teaching, scrawling all over every available whiteboard, and drawing arrows back to previous topics with an "and so!" flourish of the marker.
I also thing it'd be great to go out to the pub with him and listen to some of these stories. ("Hey, I did not need to know the thing about lice in the eyelashes! Ew!" "I know, right!")
It completely blew me away. (I am going to buy it next time I'm at Powell's, and I'm a die-hard library user.)
Unlike Dunn's other book (_Every Living Thing_), which I also loved, you do not have to be a biologist or even a scientist to maximize your enjoyment here. _The Wild Life_ is much more accessible to the layperson. I'm recommending it to pretty much everyone. (Yes, even you.) There are lots of amazing new ideas here, and new research for those of you that don't keep up with the latest (like, our appendix actually has a purpose!)
I love Dunn's writing style. He roams seemingly all over, and you're like "dude where are you going with this" but he brings the topics neatly back to his original point, so you don't feel lost for long. I picture him teaching, scrawling all over every available whiteboard, and drawing arrows back to previous topics with an "and so!" flourish of the marker.
I also thing it'd be great to go out to the pub with him and listen to some of these stories. ("Hey, I did not need to know the thing about lice in the eyelashes! Ew!" "I know, right!")
June 1, 2016
This was an entertaining and extremely interesting book to read, but somewhat light on the actual science. The main idea covered in this book is that humans are in many cases over-designed because of the loss of species (parasites, predators, symbiotes) that helped to make us who we are today.
This book covers a wide variety of topics that show the inter-relatedness of humans, their evolution and their environment, including parasites, predators and domesticated organisms. The author discusses (among other things) the possible causes of auto-immune disease (lack of parasites), the reasons for our hairlessness (trying to get rid of lice), the uses of the appendix, our past and present relationship with predators that may cause various anxiety issues and be responsible for our colour vision. The final section of the book discusses how humans could make city environments more like the environment we evolved in. I loved the ideas and hypotheses discussed in this book and the combination of different fields of science, I just with there was more science. If, on the other hand, you don't know too much about science, then you should read this entertaining and informative popular science book.
This book covers a wide variety of topics that show the inter-relatedness of humans, their evolution and their environment, including parasites, predators and domesticated organisms. The author discusses (among other things) the possible causes of auto-immune disease (lack of parasites), the reasons for our hairlessness (trying to get rid of lice), the uses of the appendix, our past and present relationship with predators that may cause various anxiety issues and be responsible for our colour vision. The final section of the book discusses how humans could make city environments more like the environment we evolved in. I loved the ideas and hypotheses discussed in this book and the combination of different fields of science, I just with there was more science. If, on the other hand, you don't know too much about science, then you should read this entertaining and informative popular science book.
March 11, 2024
A required read for a college botany class on symbiosis in nature. Rob Dunn is so entertaining and presents some very interesting thoughts throughout the book. This book absolutely changed the way I look at my life as a human being and encouraged me to change how I interact with the environment and with the animals around me :)
December 12, 2025
I’ve just finished reading the book and reviewing my notes. And I’m a little puzzled about how I should rate it. As I was reading, I was mentally ticking off: I knew that and I know that and even things like termites are colour blind ...where I think I knew that before. But there is such a wealth of factual information there, wrapped up into a kind of story, that it is hard not to be impressed. Of course there is also some speculation about things that might have happened. Maybe fairly wild speculation......Like Chrone’s disease being relieved by hook worm infestation. Here, at least, Dunn is open that it is clearly not the full story. But it’s certainly interesting. And I found myself wondering about the huge fruits of some trees (like Jackfruit). Did they really evolve to be spread around by megafauna? Well maybe. But I recall seeing a durian tree in Malaysia ...out in the jungle...with a clearing all around it and a steel sheath around the trunk....both measures to protect it from monkeys. But the monkeys are not megafauna and the cockatoos also enjoy ripping into durians and jackfruit. So, I’m not sure the megafauna hypothesis stands.
I found the story about Palmer’s conclusion that no bacteria could be found in the human stomach quite interesting. This historical episode has become one of the central examples of an inquiry in which everything was done by the book and yet, the scientific community, on the whole, was sidetracked towards a false theory for a long period of time. But I note that Bartosz et al in 2021 come to the conclusion that the bacterial theory had already been largely abandoned Before Palmer....so why should we care about this. Well the authors point out that equivalent examples in Network epistemology are rather hard to find.
I’ve read quite a lot recently about the gut biome, and about parasitology, and the immune systems so much of this was not totally new to me. But Rob Dunn puts a good story together, ....and I greatly enjoyed his book: “Every Living thing” about humanity’s quest to catalogue every living thing. An easy five stars, for the current book, from me.
I’ve extracted some segments below which caught my eye as I was reading ..and it’s partly my attempt to summarise the main arguments but also to help me to remember them. The underlying theme of the book is that Humans are the product of evolution and that evolution occurred in conjunction with parasites, disease and predators.
The argument is that our immune system has also evolved to resist infection by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites and some of the symptoms we see in people today might be due to our immune systems or mental processes kicking into gear when there are no pathogens. Our cultures have changed. Our behaviours have changed. Our diets have changed. Our medicine has changed. But our bodies are the same, essentially unaltered from 6,000 generations ago Crohn’s disease is one example where some people deliberately infected with hookworm, (which was endemic in most cultures 200 years ago) seemed to recover.
Researchers have suggested that many or most, or perhaps all autoimmune and allergic diseases were the result of missing our parasites. Perhaps even depression. It seems clear that parasites and these diseases are related, but it is less clear how they are related.....The lesson that the worms clearly offer, though, is that the old medical model, in which we just scrub the rest of life off our bodies, is wrong. Major systems of our bodies, including our immune system, evolved to work best when other species lived on us.
More than a thousand species of microbes have been found in human guts. And now that microbes can be identified based on their RNA, we do not have to culture them to know whether they are present....While the different antibiotics tended to kill slightly different microbes, none simply killed “the bad bacteria.” Many different kinds of bacteria were affected. It’s thought that the microbes in our guts are our obligate mutualist partners, where “obligate” means they are necessary and “mutualist” simply means that they and we both benefit from the relationship.
.......What Parker thought was that everyone who had ever studied IgA in the gut had been wrong about its function. The IgA were actually helping bacteria! .Eventually, Parker was able to show in the lab that bacteria were nearly twice as likely to stick to human cells when IgA was present....In Parker’s lab study, the one that initially no one would publish, he found that gut bacteria grow fifteen times as fast when IgA is present than when it is absent...When Parker began his work, it was believed that the function of the native immune system in our gut was primarily to attack bacteria. Case closed. Now Parker and a growing number of other scientists argued the exact opposite.
Bollinger’s interpretation is that the appendix houses large numbers of bacteria in biofilms that in turn offer services to our gut, for our benefit. In addition, Bollinger argues that the appendix is a shelter from the storm. When a severe pathogen such as cholera wipes out the good bacteria of the intestine, they can, from the appendix, be restored......It was a breakthrough to realize that our immune system, appendix included, might be helping rather than hindering the microbes in our guts.
Though many insects have evolved the ability to farm, among the mammals we are unique. We learned to farm after the farming ants, beetles, and termites, and so now, like them, we sow the fruits whose consequences we reap......Hunter-gatherers seem to have lived longer, on average, than did early agriculturalists.....The transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer tended to lead to an increase in disease burden, including digestive disorders associated with this new diet.
The origin of the modern cow from the aurochs begins around 9,000 years ago...With humans, the aurochs did far better than it might have done otherwise.....A unique set of traits also began to be favoured in humans themselves. The traits favoured were those associated with lactase persistence (the ability to digest milk as an adult). Adult dogs cannot digest milk, nor can adult cows, pigs, monkeys, rats, or any other mammals.....In order to digest milk as adults, humans had to evolve the ability to continue to produce lactase as adults......Yet today, most peoples of western European descent, which is to say those people who descended from the first cow tenders, can digest milk as adults....Several years ago scientists identified the mutation that is associated in Europeans with the ability to drink milk as adults.....(The mutation leads to the production of lactase or, more specifically, lactase-phlorizin hydrolase.)
With milk, much, but not all, of human population changed....It is already known that people who live in regions where grains were domesticated have extra amylase genes, amylase being one of the enzymes that helps to break down starch....By some estimates, 75 percent of all the food consumed in the world comes from just six plants and one animal....The milky, high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar lifestyle we are imposing on our variety of different stories and genes has consequences for our modern health that depend both on who you are and also on who your ancestors were.
Roughly 25 percent of the people on earth are totally unable to digest lactose as adults and another 40 to 50 percent can only partially digest lactose....Some humans have extra amylase genes, and so produce more amylase. Those individuals digest starch more quickly and efficiently.....In those peoples that began to farm starchy foods, individuals with more copies of the amylase gene did better, and so passed on their genes..
When we see, hear, or experience something that triggers fear, the suppression is released and fear courses through us, instantly, like a bomb in our brain.....In the wild history of humans and large predators, we were long unambiguously the prey.....In a study of Pleistocene leopard diets, A. africanus individuals were the most common prey item at one site, which is to say the leopards were actually specializing in our ancestors....If early humans were like modern primates, death by predation would have been 30 times more likely at any moment than is death by cancer today.
We still have adrenal glands and the amygdala in our brains that translate what we perceive into our body’s response....even though we now stand essentially no chance of being eaten or even chased by a predator.....One place we still see the workings of our fear is in our demand for scary movies and books.......each of which terrifies us and as it does, triggers the same chemicals in our bodies once stimulated by the tigers near our villages....We think about our budgets and fear their consequences. These diffuse fears trigger the same responses that the tigers once did, but they do so chronically, a little bit each day. Instead of yielding a resolution, this fear yields anxiety and stress.....Nor are stress and anxiety the only manifestation of our ancient urges to flee or freeze.....Our modern phobias relate to our ancient system of fear, misplaced in our modern circumstances. Along with these phobias come panic and even post-traumatic stress disorder, both also related to fear cues left to wander, misplaced, among the cells of the mind.
Evidence from the genes of different mammals suggests that just as our vision [in evolutionary terms] was becoming ever better, at least some of our other senses grew worse. Genes associated with smell mutated, one after the other, and because smell had become so unimportant relative to sight......Our vision may have been shaped when we were prey, but its greatest effects came once we had turned into predators.
We never, in our long evolutionary history, faced a situation in which we had too much sugar.. Our body’s demand for sugar is essentially infinite and irrational, but that was never a problem until we evolved the ability to wield tools and change the land.....Our circulatory system evolved when we were still fish in the sea, and salt was everywhere.
Then we left the sea and moved ashore, where salt is scarce. ...We developed the ability to harvest, store, and even produce salt. Now we are like fish again. We have plenty of salt, but our taste buds are ancient, and so they still beg for the stuff and we give it to them, one chip, bowl of tomato soup, or soda at a time...Nor is it just salt and sweet. Our other taste buds beg, universally, for fats and proteins.. As for bitter and sour flavours, they do the reverse. Bitter flavours signal strong chemicals, and so when we taste them, we have a bad sensation, a sensation that makes us want to spit or vomit.
Why did our species become one of the very few mammals to lose most of its hair?...One possibility, suggested by three waves of scientists across more than a century. Each of them has argued that hairlessness evolved because our ancestors were unusually tick, louse, fly, and, more generally, parasite-ridden and being hairless eliminated sites for these parasites to hang-out.
Fincher knew that as humans settled into permanent or semi-permanent villages, the pathogens that cause infectious diseases grew more diverse and more common. When we stopped moving, the diseases started to catch up with us....By 200 years ago, despite being naked and relatively flea-and louse-free, humans collectively hosted hundreds of different kinds of pathogens, more types of pathogens, for example, than can be found on all of the Carnivore species in North America....In 2004. Jason Faulkner suggested that xenophobia, the fear of others, evolved to control the spread of disease. Faulkner imagined that when diseases are common, xenophobia might guard us against diseases that travel from one tribe to the next.....Our dislike for the others seemed like an evolutionary universal to Faulkner, one that might be stronger where disease is more prevalent in a way that, while it causes social problems, may once have saved lives...... What Schaller and Fincher have gone on to argue is that in addition to our immune system (and perhaps our hairlessness), we also fight disease through a behavioural immune system. That system is born in part of an emotion, disgust, which rises to our consciousness but also seems to directly affect our bodies, behaviours, and cultures..... Disgust evolved to trigger us to distance ourselves from disease-related stimuli and to trigger our immune systems to “get ready.”....The most obvious cost is that our immune systems and behaviours related to defence against disease may become hyperactive....... What if, they have suggested, diseases, xenophobia, and collectivism also make democracy more difficult to attain or maintain? What if they make war more likely too?
Dunn, leaves the idea hanging. An interesting idea. Probably with some merit. But we can work to overcome the xenophobia ..and the emergence of modern countries (for example, in Europe) that were once comprised of thousands of warring kingdoms (or villages) is evidence that much can be achieved.
An interesting, occasionally, thought-provoking book. Five stars from me.
I found the story about Palmer’s conclusion that no bacteria could be found in the human stomach quite interesting. This historical episode has become one of the central examples of an inquiry in which everything was done by the book and yet, the scientific community, on the whole, was sidetracked towards a false theory for a long period of time. But I note that Bartosz et al in 2021 come to the conclusion that the bacterial theory had already been largely abandoned Before Palmer....so why should we care about this. Well the authors point out that equivalent examples in Network epistemology are rather hard to find.
I’ve read quite a lot recently about the gut biome, and about parasitology, and the immune systems so much of this was not totally new to me. But Rob Dunn puts a good story together, ....and I greatly enjoyed his book: “Every Living thing” about humanity’s quest to catalogue every living thing. An easy five stars, for the current book, from me.
I’ve extracted some segments below which caught my eye as I was reading ..and it’s partly my attempt to summarise the main arguments but also to help me to remember them. The underlying theme of the book is that Humans are the product of evolution and that evolution occurred in conjunction with parasites, disease and predators.
The argument is that our immune system has also evolved to resist infection by bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites and some of the symptoms we see in people today might be due to our immune systems or mental processes kicking into gear when there are no pathogens. Our cultures have changed. Our behaviours have changed. Our diets have changed. Our medicine has changed. But our bodies are the same, essentially unaltered from 6,000 generations ago Crohn’s disease is one example where some people deliberately infected with hookworm, (which was endemic in most cultures 200 years ago) seemed to recover.
Researchers have suggested that many or most, or perhaps all autoimmune and allergic diseases were the result of missing our parasites. Perhaps even depression. It seems clear that parasites and these diseases are related, but it is less clear how they are related.....The lesson that the worms clearly offer, though, is that the old medical model, in which we just scrub the rest of life off our bodies, is wrong. Major systems of our bodies, including our immune system, evolved to work best when other species lived on us.
More than a thousand species of microbes have been found in human guts. And now that microbes can be identified based on their RNA, we do not have to culture them to know whether they are present....While the different antibiotics tended to kill slightly different microbes, none simply killed “the bad bacteria.” Many different kinds of bacteria were affected. It’s thought that the microbes in our guts are our obligate mutualist partners, where “obligate” means they are necessary and “mutualist” simply means that they and we both benefit from the relationship.
.......What Parker thought was that everyone who had ever studied IgA in the gut had been wrong about its function. The IgA were actually helping bacteria! .Eventually, Parker was able to show in the lab that bacteria were nearly twice as likely to stick to human cells when IgA was present....In Parker’s lab study, the one that initially no one would publish, he found that gut bacteria grow fifteen times as fast when IgA is present than when it is absent...When Parker began his work, it was believed that the function of the native immune system in our gut was primarily to attack bacteria. Case closed. Now Parker and a growing number of other scientists argued the exact opposite.
Bollinger’s interpretation is that the appendix houses large numbers of bacteria in biofilms that in turn offer services to our gut, for our benefit. In addition, Bollinger argues that the appendix is a shelter from the storm. When a severe pathogen such as cholera wipes out the good bacteria of the intestine, they can, from the appendix, be restored......It was a breakthrough to realize that our immune system, appendix included, might be helping rather than hindering the microbes in our guts.
Though many insects have evolved the ability to farm, among the mammals we are unique. We learned to farm after the farming ants, beetles, and termites, and so now, like them, we sow the fruits whose consequences we reap......Hunter-gatherers seem to have lived longer, on average, than did early agriculturalists.....The transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer tended to lead to an increase in disease burden, including digestive disorders associated with this new diet.
The origin of the modern cow from the aurochs begins around 9,000 years ago...With humans, the aurochs did far better than it might have done otherwise.....A unique set of traits also began to be favoured in humans themselves. The traits favoured were those associated with lactase persistence (the ability to digest milk as an adult). Adult dogs cannot digest milk, nor can adult cows, pigs, monkeys, rats, or any other mammals.....In order to digest milk as adults, humans had to evolve the ability to continue to produce lactase as adults......Yet today, most peoples of western European descent, which is to say those people who descended from the first cow tenders, can digest milk as adults....Several years ago scientists identified the mutation that is associated in Europeans with the ability to drink milk as adults.....(The mutation leads to the production of lactase or, more specifically, lactase-phlorizin hydrolase.)
With milk, much, but not all, of human population changed....It is already known that people who live in regions where grains were domesticated have extra amylase genes, amylase being one of the enzymes that helps to break down starch....By some estimates, 75 percent of all the food consumed in the world comes from just six plants and one animal....The milky, high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar lifestyle we are imposing on our variety of different stories and genes has consequences for our modern health that depend both on who you are and also on who your ancestors were.
Roughly 25 percent of the people on earth are totally unable to digest lactose as adults and another 40 to 50 percent can only partially digest lactose....Some humans have extra amylase genes, and so produce more amylase. Those individuals digest starch more quickly and efficiently.....In those peoples that began to farm starchy foods, individuals with more copies of the amylase gene did better, and so passed on their genes..
When we see, hear, or experience something that triggers fear, the suppression is released and fear courses through us, instantly, like a bomb in our brain.....In the wild history of humans and large predators, we were long unambiguously the prey.....In a study of Pleistocene leopard diets, A. africanus individuals were the most common prey item at one site, which is to say the leopards were actually specializing in our ancestors....If early humans were like modern primates, death by predation would have been 30 times more likely at any moment than is death by cancer today.
We still have adrenal glands and the amygdala in our brains that translate what we perceive into our body’s response....even though we now stand essentially no chance of being eaten or even chased by a predator.....One place we still see the workings of our fear is in our demand for scary movies and books.......each of which terrifies us and as it does, triggers the same chemicals in our bodies once stimulated by the tigers near our villages....We think about our budgets and fear their consequences. These diffuse fears trigger the same responses that the tigers once did, but they do so chronically, a little bit each day. Instead of yielding a resolution, this fear yields anxiety and stress.....Nor are stress and anxiety the only manifestation of our ancient urges to flee or freeze.....Our modern phobias relate to our ancient system of fear, misplaced in our modern circumstances. Along with these phobias come panic and even post-traumatic stress disorder, both also related to fear cues left to wander, misplaced, among the cells of the mind.
Evidence from the genes of different mammals suggests that just as our vision [in evolutionary terms] was becoming ever better, at least some of our other senses grew worse. Genes associated with smell mutated, one after the other, and because smell had become so unimportant relative to sight......Our vision may have been shaped when we were prey, but its greatest effects came once we had turned into predators.
We never, in our long evolutionary history, faced a situation in which we had too much sugar.. Our body’s demand for sugar is essentially infinite and irrational, but that was never a problem until we evolved the ability to wield tools and change the land.....Our circulatory system evolved when we were still fish in the sea, and salt was everywhere.
Then we left the sea and moved ashore, where salt is scarce. ...We developed the ability to harvest, store, and even produce salt. Now we are like fish again. We have plenty of salt, but our taste buds are ancient, and so they still beg for the stuff and we give it to them, one chip, bowl of tomato soup, or soda at a time...Nor is it just salt and sweet. Our other taste buds beg, universally, for fats and proteins.. As for bitter and sour flavours, they do the reverse. Bitter flavours signal strong chemicals, and so when we taste them, we have a bad sensation, a sensation that makes us want to spit or vomit.
Why did our species become one of the very few mammals to lose most of its hair?...One possibility, suggested by three waves of scientists across more than a century. Each of them has argued that hairlessness evolved because our ancestors were unusually tick, louse, fly, and, more generally, parasite-ridden and being hairless eliminated sites for these parasites to hang-out.
Fincher knew that as humans settled into permanent or semi-permanent villages, the pathogens that cause infectious diseases grew more diverse and more common. When we stopped moving, the diseases started to catch up with us....By 200 years ago, despite being naked and relatively flea-and louse-free, humans collectively hosted hundreds of different kinds of pathogens, more types of pathogens, for example, than can be found on all of the Carnivore species in North America....In 2004. Jason Faulkner suggested that xenophobia, the fear of others, evolved to control the spread of disease. Faulkner imagined that when diseases are common, xenophobia might guard us against diseases that travel from one tribe to the next.....Our dislike for the others seemed like an evolutionary universal to Faulkner, one that might be stronger where disease is more prevalent in a way that, while it causes social problems, may once have saved lives...... What Schaller and Fincher have gone on to argue is that in addition to our immune system (and perhaps our hairlessness), we also fight disease through a behavioural immune system. That system is born in part of an emotion, disgust, which rises to our consciousness but also seems to directly affect our bodies, behaviours, and cultures..... Disgust evolved to trigger us to distance ourselves from disease-related stimuli and to trigger our immune systems to “get ready.”....The most obvious cost is that our immune systems and behaviours related to defence against disease may become hyperactive....... What if, they have suggested, diseases, xenophobia, and collectivism also make democracy more difficult to attain or maintain? What if they make war more likely too?
Dunn, leaves the idea hanging. An interesting idea. Probably with some merit. But we can work to overcome the xenophobia ..and the emergence of modern countries (for example, in Europe) that were once comprised of thousands of warring kingdoms (or villages) is evidence that much can be achieved.
An interesting, occasionally, thought-provoking book. Five stars from me.
March 14, 2019
The author provides good information on several different scenarios of predators, parasite and partners, but the overarching theme was not fully tied together.
July 5, 2023
tapeworms ain’t that bad
September 16, 2011
This was a quite interesting and fun read. The title is slightly misleading if it makes you think of only what is on or in our bodies. This book covers more. Interesting chapter titles include "when cows and grass domesticated humans", "we were hunted, which is why all of are afraid some of the time and some of us are afraid all of the time" and "how lice and ticks mad us naked and gave us skin cancer", to name a few.
What I learned that I didn't know before: some creatures and living things are alive today who's evolutionary "half" has been eradicated. For example pronghorns and their inexplicable and ridiculous speed: missing the American cheetac. Second thing I learned (that I should have known): when you use antibiotics you kill not only the bacteria you intend to kill, but also most other useful microbes in the gut. Third thing I learned: fear of snakes gave us better eyesight. Fourth thing: we might be snaked to avoid ectoparasites.
All in all this book is informative and interesting. It is however, extremely adapted to the non-scientific reader, repeating things often and explaining things I don't need explained. The author also names a scientist afraid of snake although he lives in "snakeless Sweden". Huh? Define "snakeless": no snakes? In which case Sweden is not snakeless, it has at least two species I know of. If it qualifies as "no known lethal snakes" so be it, Sweden is snakeless. This makes me think the dear Mr. Dunn might be wrong about other things, but I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt.
All in all this is a quite intertaining and highly informative book well worth reading. No need to worry about scientific jargon, that's for sure! All will be explained, whether you like it or not.
What I learned that I didn't know before: some creatures and living things are alive today who's evolutionary "half" has been eradicated. For example pronghorns and their inexplicable and ridiculous speed: missing the American cheetac. Second thing I learned (that I should have known): when you use antibiotics you kill not only the bacteria you intend to kill, but also most other useful microbes in the gut. Third thing I learned: fear of snakes gave us better eyesight. Fourth thing: we might be snaked to avoid ectoparasites.
All in all this book is informative and interesting. It is however, extremely adapted to the non-scientific reader, repeating things often and explaining things I don't need explained. The author also names a scientist afraid of snake although he lives in "snakeless Sweden". Huh? Define "snakeless": no snakes? In which case Sweden is not snakeless, it has at least two species I know of. If it qualifies as "no known lethal snakes" so be it, Sweden is snakeless. This makes me think the dear Mr. Dunn might be wrong about other things, but I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt.
All in all this is a quite intertaining and highly informative book well worth reading. No need to worry about scientific jargon, that's for sure! All will be explained, whether you like it or not.
September 9, 2016
Similar to the New Germ theory of disease in many aspects, the book argues not only that there are many diseases caused by either pathogens, or the lack of them, but that many other aspects of humanity, such as colour vision and xenophobia were fixed in us because of predators or pathogens. Often, he makes a good case, but there is a tendency to jump on any crank suggestion and shout "ooh, this could be true, we should sow it is wrong before dismissing it", which might be technically true, but in reality there are so many possible crank explanations of everything, that it is on the proponents to gather the evidence in favour.
Another issue I had was his pushing of a viral cause for cancer. This is well known in some epithelial cancers, such as those caused by HPV, but in most others, the evidence is limited at best, but he made it sound as though it was extremely strong and it is only scientists, showing the same reticence to new ideas that they did when the viral cause theory was. In reality, though it was ignored for a time, it later became a major field of study, but people just did not find it then, and it was dropped.
Another issue I had was his pushing of a viral cause for cancer. This is well known in some epithelial cancers, such as those caused by HPV, but in most others, the evidence is limited at best, but he made it sound as though it was extremely strong and it is only scientists, showing the same reticence to new ideas that they did when the viral cause theory was. In reality, though it was ignored for a time, it later became a major field of study, but people just did not find it then, and it was dropped.
October 25, 2012
This book had a few "wow" moments, where I had to get up and tell my wife and family about the amazing insights delivered in this book. Those moments are what keep me coming back to nonfiction, what I live for in reading. Unfortunately, the few wow moments (parasites and autoimmune disease) were more than overbalanced by the shakier theories (loss of predators and modern anxiety issues?) and the rehashing of popular health ideas (good gut bacteria and its necessity). While all of that may be excusable, the author's attempts to add drama were nerve-grating - another reviewer likened the tone to a cable-channel documentary, and that's exactly what this book is, replete with the repetition and an overdramatic narrator - you can almost here the over-the-top orchestral soundtrack that accompanies everything on the History channel. For a casual reader, a great read. For those more familiar with the genre, there may be better options.
November 2, 2011
Dunn's premise is that we have shaped evolution as much as evolution has shaped us, and not always to our advantage. His argument is fairly strong, and his conclusions well worth consideration. But it is something implicit in his presentation that I think is equally important: the degree of specialization in science is a barrier to some types of insights that only come from connecting notions from disparate fields.
November 8, 2012
The title & synopsis were misleading; I was hoping for a tour of human internal microbiology, something I didn't know about our "parasites & partners", but it focused almost entirely on a single "they don't want you to know" experimental treatment- the treatment of Crohn's with gut nematodes. Some of the discussion of hygiene theory was great, but I was surprised at how it stuck on nematodes for Crohn's. Kinda weak.
May 2, 2016
Fascinating and, at least occasionally, exciting. We appear to need bacteria and certain parasites. However, as with many popular science books, I can't help thinking that I am not getting the full story and that statistics are being suspiciously used to lead me to a certain conclusion. That's what happens when you are ignorant of many things, you get suspicious that someone is deliberately obfuscating the topic for you. To cynical?
February 13, 2016
I honestly enjoyed this book. It intrigued me.
It's so funny because I accidentally checked this book out of the library and thought it was something else. I thought I might as well read it.
From the first part I was in love. It helped that the topic was rather interesting but the way the author expressed his opinions and facts made it readable.
Totally recommend.
It's so funny because I accidentally checked this book out of the library and thought it was something else. I thought I might as well read it.
From the first part I was in love. It helped that the topic was rather interesting but the way the author expressed his opinions and facts made it readable.
Totally recommend.
August 4, 2011
Very informative and interesting. Sadly it ends not very strong, but at that point I was in full agreement so maybe i was disappointed i wasn't won over.
March 7, 2013
The point of view was very one-sided. For a much more objective and better written book on the subject, read An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velasquez-Manoff.
July 25, 2015
Dunn’s book addresses a host of intriguing questions such as:
-Why are there diseases that disproportionately attack those in the richest parts of the world while being almost non-existent in poor countries?
-Why is obesity at epidemic proportions among modern humans?
-Why—while people have diverse tastes overall—do there seem to be universal preferences for sweet, salty, and fatty foods?
-Why are so many people’s lives wrecked by constant stress and worry?
-Is the Appendix really a vestigial organ with no apparent purpose?
As the subtitle suggests, this book is about the role that other species have played in human evolution and the way we look, behave, and think today. The message of The Wild Life of Our Bodies is that humanity’s proclivity to see itself as an island--uninfluenced by other species--has its cost.
The book is popular science--approachable to a layman but with the usual disdain for gratuitous assertions and shoddy reasoning that define the scientific though process. That being said, Dunn does put some editorial opinion out there in ways that might appear as fact in a slipshod reading. The most prominent example being Dunn’s suggesting that what best defines humanity is not our intelligence or ability for abstract representation (or even our physical appearance), but that we are the only (first?) species that has killed other species off not purely of self-defense or for food, but to exercise control over our ecosystem. I doubt this would strike a majority of impartial scientists as a fair and unbiased way to define humanity. Granted, this point not what The Wild Life of Our Bodies is about, and whether one thinks this it is fair or not is not critical to whether one will find the book to be of value. However, the idea (and the fact) that humans have zealously killed off other creatures is certainly relevant to the discussion at hand.
If “terraforming” is the term for how an alien race might environmentally engineer Earth to make it suitable for them to live here, perhaps we could call humanity’s assault on other species “bio-forming” of the planet—choosing a roster of species that strikes our fancy. All the time humans were trying to make ourselves more comfortable by getting rid of inconvenient species, we remained ignorant to the downside.
Dunn covers a broad range of mismatches between who we are evolutionarily and how we live in the modern world. The Wild Life of Our Bodies suggests that, like the pronghorn antelope, humans are in many cases over-designed because of the loss of species (parasites, predators, symbiotes, etc.) that helped to make us who we are today. (One question that once puzzled biologists was why pronghorns were so much faster than every species they faced.)
While it sounds good to be over-designed (at least relative to the alternative), it’s not without cost. In our case, we had guts that were supremely adapted to having parasites, but the lightning fast (on an evolutionary timescale) elimination of those parasites has left us with bodies that attack a non-existent enemy and this has resulted in a number of new diseases. We are used to diseases that succeed in the poorest—and, hence, least hygienic areas-- but disease that mostly attacked in the cleanest places on Earth have puzzled us for some time. Crohn’s disease is a prime example. “Rewilding” (i.e. putting parasites back into) the guts of Crohn’s patients has shown positive results.
Dunn lays out a couple of the theories as to how the loss of our intestinal bacteria may result in a number of first-world ailments. Interestingly, some of these diseases aren’t even digestive in nature, and might seem to have no logical connection to gut bacteria. However, our body’s systems are a system-of-systems—i.e. they are integrally linked. One issue is that some parasites have been able to mask their presence, and our bodies have learned to present a heightened response to account for this veiled threat. Today our systems can’t tell the difference between our squeaky clean guts and a gut full of these sneaking parasites so it drops the immune system version of an A-bomb.
This is one example of why some diseases don’t exist in the third-world where the body knows what parasites it’s up against. One might say, “Yes, but these ailments of over-reactive systems can’t be as bad as the effects of the parasites.” That’s often not true. Most people with internal bugs (we all have them to some degree), don’t even realize it. The fact that people with Crohns’ are willing to have predators implanted in them speaks to this issue.
There has been concern for years about downside of the rampant use of anti-bacterials, antibiotics, and antiseptics, and this is a topic Dunn addresses as well. For example, there seems to be little evidence that such agents in soap do any particular good, but they decidedly do bad (encouraging drug resistant species.)
Perhaps the single greatest change in the nature of homo sapiens life resulted from the agricultural revolution, and Dunn delves into how this seminal event changed our bodies. With paleo-dieting all the rage, it will come as no surprise that there have been some major changes to the human diet since our hunter-gatherer ancestors roamed the Earth. Once again, we have bodies built on an evolutionary timescale, and they don’t necessarily cope well with our new diets.
One problem is that we have strong hardwired drives for foods that were a rarity in our species’ past, but which we now produce in abundance. For example, we eat far too much refined sugar because our bodies are wired to love sweet, but that kind of food was rare to our pre-agricultural ancestors. Hence we have the existence of diabetes, and its greater prevalence where high-sugar diets are common. Many people are also saddled with an evolutionary advantage to store fat because their ancestors come from a clime where food was not abundant year round. The problem is that now there’s a grocery store on every corner and this once great advantage is contributing to burgeoning waistlines.
I gave this book a high rating on the grounds that it presented a lot of food for thought, and that’s what I most value in non-fiction. Some of the theories may turn out to be incorrect, but this book offers one a lot to think about and clear explanations of the bases for what can otherwise seem a little outlandish. There is also some wit in places that contributes to heightened readability.
-Why are there diseases that disproportionately attack those in the richest parts of the world while being almost non-existent in poor countries?
-Why is obesity at epidemic proportions among modern humans?
-Why—while people have diverse tastes overall—do there seem to be universal preferences for sweet, salty, and fatty foods?
-Why are so many people’s lives wrecked by constant stress and worry?
-Is the Appendix really a vestigial organ with no apparent purpose?
As the subtitle suggests, this book is about the role that other species have played in human evolution and the way we look, behave, and think today. The message of The Wild Life of Our Bodies is that humanity’s proclivity to see itself as an island--uninfluenced by other species--has its cost.
The book is popular science--approachable to a layman but with the usual disdain for gratuitous assertions and shoddy reasoning that define the scientific though process. That being said, Dunn does put some editorial opinion out there in ways that might appear as fact in a slipshod reading. The most prominent example being Dunn’s suggesting that what best defines humanity is not our intelligence or ability for abstract representation (or even our physical appearance), but that we are the only (first?) species that has killed other species off not purely of self-defense or for food, but to exercise control over our ecosystem. I doubt this would strike a majority of impartial scientists as a fair and unbiased way to define humanity. Granted, this point not what The Wild Life of Our Bodies is about, and whether one thinks this it is fair or not is not critical to whether one will find the book to be of value. However, the idea (and the fact) that humans have zealously killed off other creatures is certainly relevant to the discussion at hand.
If “terraforming” is the term for how an alien race might environmentally engineer Earth to make it suitable for them to live here, perhaps we could call humanity’s assault on other species “bio-forming” of the planet—choosing a roster of species that strikes our fancy. All the time humans were trying to make ourselves more comfortable by getting rid of inconvenient species, we remained ignorant to the downside.
Dunn covers a broad range of mismatches between who we are evolutionarily and how we live in the modern world. The Wild Life of Our Bodies suggests that, like the pronghorn antelope, humans are in many cases over-designed because of the loss of species (parasites, predators, symbiotes, etc.) that helped to make us who we are today. (One question that once puzzled biologists was why pronghorns were so much faster than every species they faced.)
While it sounds good to be over-designed (at least relative to the alternative), it’s not without cost. In our case, we had guts that were supremely adapted to having parasites, but the lightning fast (on an evolutionary timescale) elimination of those parasites has left us with bodies that attack a non-existent enemy and this has resulted in a number of new diseases. We are used to diseases that succeed in the poorest—and, hence, least hygienic areas-- but disease that mostly attacked in the cleanest places on Earth have puzzled us for some time. Crohn’s disease is a prime example. “Rewilding” (i.e. putting parasites back into) the guts of Crohn’s patients has shown positive results.
Dunn lays out a couple of the theories as to how the loss of our intestinal bacteria may result in a number of first-world ailments. Interestingly, some of these diseases aren’t even digestive in nature, and might seem to have no logical connection to gut bacteria. However, our body’s systems are a system-of-systems—i.e. they are integrally linked. One issue is that some parasites have been able to mask their presence, and our bodies have learned to present a heightened response to account for this veiled threat. Today our systems can’t tell the difference between our squeaky clean guts and a gut full of these sneaking parasites so it drops the immune system version of an A-bomb.
This is one example of why some diseases don’t exist in the third-world where the body knows what parasites it’s up against. One might say, “Yes, but these ailments of over-reactive systems can’t be as bad as the effects of the parasites.” That’s often not true. Most people with internal bugs (we all have them to some degree), don’t even realize it. The fact that people with Crohns’ are willing to have predators implanted in them speaks to this issue.
There has been concern for years about downside of the rampant use of anti-bacterials, antibiotics, and antiseptics, and this is a topic Dunn addresses as well. For example, there seems to be little evidence that such agents in soap do any particular good, but they decidedly do bad (encouraging drug resistant species.)
Perhaps the single greatest change in the nature of homo sapiens life resulted from the agricultural revolution, and Dunn delves into how this seminal event changed our bodies. With paleo-dieting all the rage, it will come as no surprise that there have been some major changes to the human diet since our hunter-gatherer ancestors roamed the Earth. Once again, we have bodies built on an evolutionary timescale, and they don’t necessarily cope well with our new diets.
One problem is that we have strong hardwired drives for foods that were a rarity in our species’ past, but which we now produce in abundance. For example, we eat far too much refined sugar because our bodies are wired to love sweet, but that kind of food was rare to our pre-agricultural ancestors. Hence we have the existence of diabetes, and its greater prevalence where high-sugar diets are common. Many people are also saddled with an evolutionary advantage to store fat because their ancestors come from a clime where food was not abundant year round. The problem is that now there’s a grocery store on every corner and this once great advantage is contributing to burgeoning waistlines.
I gave this book a high rating on the grounds that it presented a lot of food for thought, and that’s what I most value in non-fiction. Some of the theories may turn out to be incorrect, but this book offers one a lot to think about and clear explanations of the bases for what can otherwise seem a little outlandish. There is also some wit in places that contributes to heightened readability.
November 6, 2021
Raamatus kirjeldab prof. Rob Dunn looduslike liikide mõju meie heaolule ja maailmale ning seda, kuidas isegi sellistes kohtades nagu meie magamistoad, kus oleme end loodusest kõige paremini puhastanud, klammerdub loodus meie külge ja kuidas see ka alatiseks nii jääb.
Arenesime parasiitide, mutualistide ja patogeenide kõrbes. Kuid me ei näe end enam osana loodusest ja laiemast elukogukonnast. Parema elu ja puhta elamise nimel oleme suure osa loodusest oma kehalt maha nühkinud ning püüdnud eemaldada igasuguseid elusid - parasiite, baktereid, mutualiste ja röövloomi -, et olla eemal metsikust ohust. Loodus on selles uues maailmas maastik akna taga, omamoodi elav maal, mille üle on meeldiv mõtiskleda ja kuhu vahel ka tore põgeneda.
Tõde on aga see, et kuigi „puhas elamine” on meile mõneski mõttes kasuks tulnud, on see Rob Dunni sõnul teinud meid ka teist moodi haigemaks. Oleme lõksus kehades, mis arenesid välja sadade teiste liikide usaldusväärse kohalolekuga. Nagu Dunn märgib, on meie kaasaegne eemaldumine eluvõrgust põhjustanud enneolematuid tagajärgi, millest immunoloogid, evolutsioonibioloogid, psühholoogid ja teised teadlased alles hakkavad aru saama.
Arenesime parasiitide, mutualistide ja patogeenide kõrbes. Kuid me ei näe end enam osana loodusest ja laiemast elukogukonnast. Parema elu ja puhta elamise nimel oleme suure osa loodusest oma kehalt maha nühkinud ning püüdnud eemaldada igasuguseid elusid - parasiite, baktereid, mutualiste ja röövloomi -, et olla eemal metsikust ohust. Loodus on selles uues maailmas maastik akna taga, omamoodi elav maal, mille üle on meeldiv mõtiskleda ja kuhu vahel ka tore põgeneda.
Tõde on aga see, et kuigi „puhas elamine” on meile mõneski mõttes kasuks tulnud, on see Rob Dunni sõnul teinud meid ka teist moodi haigemaks. Oleme lõksus kehades, mis arenesid välja sadade teiste liikide usaldusväärse kohalolekuga. Nagu Dunn märgib, on meie kaasaegne eemaldumine eluvõrgust põhjustanud enneolematuid tagajärgi, millest immunoloogid, evolutsioonibioloogid, psühholoogid ja teised teadlased alles hakkavad aru saama.
March 31, 2019
Biologist and science writer Rob Dunn adeptly challenges today's germaphobic view of health with an in-depth exploration into the life supporting role of both parasites and predators (both of which humankind seems hellbent on eradicating). I was blown away by his detailed reporting into the world of worm tourism for those seeking a cure for Crohn's disease, as well as his argument for bringing back large predatory animals onto the American plains. While it seems like many of the reviewers here work in the fields of biology and medicine, I read this book as a layperson with minimal prior knowledge and appreciated its accessibility. Two-thirds of the way in, however, I felt like the subject matter became a little too broad. The chapter on cow's milk, while intriguing, was a bit of a wild card, and the parasite research was so interesting that he could have written the entire book about that alone. "The Wild Life of Our Bodies" was quite an eye-opener and I left its pages with copious notes!
February 19, 2025
An environmental agenda masquerading as a scientific book about evolutionary biology, but hugely enjoyable despite this. The initial sections of the book are excellent in discussing the role in internal worms on our evolution with useful side-tracks of about other species and convergent evolution. I even enjoyed the quite long human interest stories with relevance to the topic being considered, even if added little scientific knowledge.
By the end the book is really a manifesto for rewilding and greater interactions with nature; Of green cities and garden buildings. None of which is a bad thing, just feel the words could have been better spent. I would have preferred greater scientific rigour but would recommend as an interesting read for those new to the topic.
So overall an enjoyable read, which is not spoilt by this being an older book (considering the topic matter and how quickly our understanding is evolving). Only the last chapter or so felt really dated. I would be interested to read a more recent book by the author to see how their views have developed.
By the end the book is really a manifesto for rewilding and greater interactions with nature; Of green cities and garden buildings. None of which is a bad thing, just feel the words could have been better spent. I would have preferred greater scientific rigour but would recommend as an interesting read for those new to the topic.
So overall an enjoyable read, which is not spoilt by this being an older book (considering the topic matter and how quickly our understanding is evolving). Only the last chapter or so felt really dated. I would be interested to read a more recent book by the author to see how their views have developed.
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