Coevolution Quotes

“Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agélastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

“God made the wolf but man made the dog. When we look at a dog, we see the best in ourselves.”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick

“Of all the animal species alive in the world now or in the past, only a relatively few have been domesticated by humans, most of them in just the last few thousand years of human history. The dog was the first, by a wide margin—the only animal believed to have been domesticated by itinerant human hunter-gatherers, long before the development of farming and permanent settlements.”
― Kay Frydenborg, A Dog in the Cave: The Wolves Who Made Us Human

“When we look at a dog, we see the best in ourselves.”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick

“God made the wolf but Man made the dog.”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick

“Few diseases have had an impact on human evolution, culture and society on par with malaria. It is one of the oldest documented infectious diseases. Indeed, it has been hypothesised that the protective effect bestowed by a heterozygous sickle cell allele explains its survival to the modern day. As such, malaria has left its footprint on human evolution in a profound way few other diseases have.

Yet its true origins were the matter of considerable controversy. The clue is in the name – the prevailing theory until Ross's discovery was that malaria resulted from 'mala aria', that is, 'bad air'.
It took the advent of modern evidence-based medical science to challenge this 'miasma theory'. Ross's elucidation of the role of mosquitoes in the lifecycle of malaria has opened up a new subject for epidemiological consideration: the vector-borne disease.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python