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But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.
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David Quammen |
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Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
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David Quammen |
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two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
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David Quammen |
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Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.
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David Quammen |
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AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908
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David Quammen |
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When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land." Wilson meant wild animals. He omitted consideration of livestock, such as the domestic cow ( Bos taurus ), of which the present global population is about 1.3 billion. We are therefore only five times as numerous as our cattle (and probably less massive in total, since ..
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David Quammen |
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It testified, I suppose, to the genderless ferocity of her mind." "Why"
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David Quammen |
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Soon afterward, in August 2008, another team was dispatched to Uganda, this time including the veterinary microbiologist Tom Ksiazek, a veteran of field responses against zoonotic outbreaks,
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David Quammen |
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She is one of this new breed of cross-trained disease specialists I've mentioned, veterinarian-ecologists who recognize the intimate connectedness of human health, wildlife health, livestock health, and the habitats we all share. For
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David Quammen |
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The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.
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David Quammen |
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The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.
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David Quammen |
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Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven't collected a single snake. Maybe it's the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in the north of the island as in the south, has passed the peak of its cycle and declined. Maybe the trap design is no good, or possibly we're using the wrong bait. Temporarily, for whatever reason, B. irregularis has turned invisible. But the con..
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David Quammen |
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Darwin wrote: "organized beings represent a tree."
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David Quammen |
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The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of "messenger" RNA."
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David Quammen |
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Later in conversation he corrected himself: It was in fact 1.1 million pigs. The difference might seem like just a rounding error, he told me, but if you ever had to kill an "extra" hundred thousand pigs and dispose of their bodies in bulldozed pits, you'd remember the difference as significant."
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epidemic
pigs
virus
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David Quammen |
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sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych
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David Quammen |
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The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years passed after the E notebook entry. The world heard nothing about natural selection.
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David Quammen |
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A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.
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David Quammen |
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Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.
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David Quammen |
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Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.
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David Quammen |
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Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.
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David Quammen |
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For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More patient even than rabies, but equally lethal.
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David Quammen |
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molecular phylogenetics.
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David Quammen |
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Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya, Junin, Borna, the influenzas, and the HIVs (HIV-1, which mainly accounts for the AIDS pandemic, and HIV-2, which is less widespread) are all viruses.
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David Quammen |
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From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time." Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: "From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens."
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David Quammen |
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Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.
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David Quammen |
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How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.
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David Quammen |