Parasite Rex Quotes

“Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antibiotic that kills bacteria: because Plasmodium has a former bacterium inside it doing some vital business.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?”
― carl zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Most Americans don’t know that in the 1800s, malaria’s range swept all the way up the Great Plains into North Dakota, or that in 1901, a fifth of the population of Staten Island carried the parasite.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Bacteria simply divide themselves in two when the time seems right, as can many single-celled eukaryotes. Many plants and animals have the ability to reproduce themselves on their own quite comfortably. Even among the species that do reproduce sexually, many can switch over to cloning. If you walk through a stand of hundreds of quaking aspen trees on a Colorado mountainside, you may be walking through a forest of clones,
produced not by seeds but by the roots of a single tree that come back up out of the ground to form new saplings.
Hermaphrodites, such as sea slugs and earthworms, are equipped with male and female sex organs and can fertilize themselves or mate with another. Some species of lizards are all mothers: in a process called parthenogenesis, they somehow trigger their unfertilized eggs to start developing. Compared with these other ways to reproduce, sex is slow and costly. A hundred parthenogenetic female lizards can produce far more offspring than fifty males and fifty females. In only fifty generations, a single cloning lizard could swamp the descendants of a million sexual ones.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures