Every Living Thing Quotes

“Science is full of egos and arrogance, but it is fuller of simple moments of pleasure at the joy of finding some gem of new knowledge, big or small. Such gems can be anyone’s.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“We imagine we will colonize other planets, but we have barely probed this one. We have yet to find a lifeless place on Earth, and there are many places we have yet to check. The surface of Earth is covered in unstudied life. There are new species, unnamed species, living even in your own body. There is much here still. More than we now know, and more than we can yet imagine.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Copernicus theorized that the Earth revolved around the sun, but it was not until he lay on his deathbed that he published anything regarding his discovery. He had largely kept it a secret, and a pretty good one as they go.* It would take Galileo to publicize and add nuance to Copernicus’s theory, but soon what was once heretical, that the Earth circled the sun, seemed obvious. Our place in the universe changed in a generation. The biological equivalent of the Copernican revolution would prove less simple. The biological world does not revolve around us, but we still tend to believe it does.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“The astronomers looked up through telescopes and saw the sky in new detail. This draper, Leeuwenhoek, looked down and saw everything else. He saw that the world was mostly microscopic. All along, the biological story had seemed to be about humans, but Leeuwenhoek would show that we were enormous and oversized—the Big Gulps of life. Linnaeus would much later show that there were more big species than had been imagined. But it was Leeuwenhoek who showed that most life was many times smaller than us. History produces unlikely revolutionaries. Leeuwenhoek was to be, without doubt, a revolutionary”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Most days you do not look at the stars, and in the same vein it is all too easy to ignore the other life we pass by. The species on our bodies are small, and the crust of the Earth is so far away.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Revelation can come in fits and starts.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“The blind men before the elephant are thus, in their way, like astrobiologists or like scientists in any new field at the frontiers of knowledge, for whom it is clear that something is being revealed, but not very clear exactly what it is. In Saxe’s story, the men never figured out what the elephant was. But in science, sometimes we do.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Heaven and Earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. . . . How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and Earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other Earths.” TENG MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER OF THE 1200S”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Leeuwenhoek, Erwin, Woese, and others were at the fringes of their respective fields, the frontiers, to be generous. The same might be said to be true, as the Urbanos point out in their article, of Galileo. Those discoverers were vindicated, but their ideas started out at the very margins of believability. If we are to look for the next big discoveries, discoveries of entire biological realms, the place to look may not be the big, well-funded labs of well-respected scientists. The place to look may be to the very fringes of science.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

“Naming species is not big science. It is like mapmaking or dictionary work and, on its own, of relatively little use. But it is the first step. It is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings. It is the simplest measure of the world. It is analogous to finding and naming the planets and the stars. Once named, it is another matter altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning. Every culture known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into knowledge and stories. Naming, and the learning associated with it, is part of what makes us human.”
― Rob Dunn, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys