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
self meat being-me
Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
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.
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."
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.
becomes brought cultures fever fortune good ill mysterious people share spirits tend terms
There's a belief in some cultures that if a person experiences good fortune in financial terms and does not share the good fortune, when that person becomes ill with a mysterious fever and dies, people tend to say: 'Aha! It was because he didn't share. It was the spirits who brought him down.'
cases human infection particular perhaps
The more cases of Ebola infection we have, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate in a particular way that adapts it well to living in humans, replicating in humans, and perhaps transmitting from human to human.
I thought 'The Hot Zone' was fascinating, mesmerizing. It's one of the things that got me interested in Ebola.
childhood happy male
I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.
april blond fierce gone humor iconic jane ponytail shines sly sparkle turned
On April 3, 2014, Jane Goodall turned 80. The iconic blond ponytail has gone gray, but the sparkle of intelligence, sly humor, and fierce dedication still shines from her hazel eyes.
carrying
You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.