In the tradition of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, This Is Your Brain on Parasites is both a journey into cutting-edge science and a revelatory examination of what it means to be human. Political, social, and religious differences among societies may be caused, in part, by the different parasites that prey on us. Our obsession with cleanliness and our experience of disgust are both evolutionary tools for avoiding infection, but they evolved differently for different populations. And more surprising still, she uncovers the decisive role that parasites may have played in the rise and demise of entire civilizations. In this mind-bending book, McAuliffe reveals the eons-old war between parasites and other creatures that is playing out in our very own bodies. In fact, a plethora of parasites affect our behavior in ways we have barely begun to understand. "Based on a wildly popular Atlantic article: an astonishing investigation into the world of microbes, and the myriad ways they control how other creatures - including humans - act, feel, and think As we are now discovering, parasites - microbes that cannot thrive and reproduce without another organism as a host - are shockingly sophisticated and extraordinarily powerful. Kathleen McAuliffe Quotes (Author of This Is Your Brain on Parasites) 39 quotes from Kathleen McAuliffe: Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |