David Quammen
David Quammen
David Quammenis an American science, nature and travel writer and the author of fifteen books, five of them fiction. He wrote a column, called "Natural Acts" for Outside magazine for fifteen years. His articles have also appeared in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. In 2013, Quammen's book Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
logic cold evolution
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
lying reading world
If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.
plutonium evolution culmination
Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.
book comforting intellectual
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
abundant cause ecological flourish habitat human introduce loose natural places rich shaking single viruses within
We're shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren't very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal. We introduce them into a new, rich habitat called the human population, where they can flourish more abundantly and cause more trouble.
dues paid prodigy
I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
novel
I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.
likely next spread thousands
Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.
disappears presumably replicate reservoir species viruses
Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.
men order ideas
There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.
hints answers shapes
Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint at being somehow perhaps on the verge or answering) a question that someone might conceivably want asked."
spiritual school intelligent
Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle.
miracle life-is-hard cheerful
What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.
land shopping issues
But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures.