Transcripts For CSPAN3 In 20240704

Host into its first human but them. Viruses can only live in cellular creatures, can only replicate in animals, plants or some other kind of cellular creature. When a new virus appears in humans, it had to come from some other living creature, almost certainly an animal, probably a mammal or bird. When the virus passes from the nonhuman animal into its first human, that is the moment of spillover. Host hardly common . Are they common . Guest more common than we recognize. We have been recognizing more and more as they occur. Whenever there is a new virus it has to come from somewhere and there has been a drumbeat of these cases, spillovers of new viruses into humans, since the early 1960s. Possibly because there are more humans on the planet coming into contact with more animals and also because we are able to detect them more, we are studying them closely. Host can you tell us what is on the cover of the book . Guest there is a primate, i think it is a baboon, unleashing a terrifying screech. The art was done by a Famous Artist for book covers and when i saw it, i thought that is fabulous, that is strong. But what is jane goodall going to say the next time i see her . She has forgiven me. Host when does a spillover become a contagion . Guest if a virus passes from a nonhuman host into a human and causes infection in the human, that is step one. A lot of viruses might spill from a nonhuman animal and not be able to infect human cells. If it catches hold and affects the human, that is a spillover. If it passes from the human to another human and another human, that is an outbreak. It is transmitting from human to human, it has either had the capacity in advance or quickly develops the capacity. If it spreads to 10,000 people across the country, you call it an epidemic. Around the world, call it a pandemic. Host as a longtime scientific investigative journalist, where did covid19 come from . Guest we do not yet know for sure. There is a lot of evidence pointing toward a natural spillover. We know that coronavirus of this sort live commonly in horseshoe bats in Southern China and other parts of southeast asia. There are viruses similar to this that have been found in horseshoe bats in those places and in Southern China. There are other forms of evidence that strongly suggest this virus originated in a bat, probably passed into an intermediate animal that was part of the wildlife for food trade in Southern China, got to the city of wuhan and was in that market, and infected people. Thereby creating the pattern that we see. Of course, people say we think it was a lab leak. You have got to investigate whether it was a virus that was worked on in a laboratory, either engineered it seems that possibility has been dismissed, or manipulated to some degree and accidentally leaked from a laboratory. Can we forget about that . Scientists are investigating, there is some theoretical possibility. But the ponderings of empirical evidence seems to me to lie on the side of a natural spillover. I spent the last two months deep into this question, researching the question of the origins and a secondary question related to that for a magazine piece that will come out sometime this summer. It will be in the paperback of my book when it is published. Updating this question, because it is important and we know a lot about it, but we do not know everything about it. And so, we have to keep studying it. We have to study it with science, not politics. Host given your knowledge in this area, are you sympathetic to those who hold the view it is a lab leak . Guest i have talked to a number of them in the course of the last two months. Some of them are very intelligent people. Some of them are trained in science. I am sympathetic to their statement that it cannot be dismissed totally out of hand. We need more evidence on the side of natural spillover. If it is a lab leak, we need a whole lot more evidence because that essentially is a set of narratives without what i would call positive evidence. In my sympathetic . Dashcam ice and pathetic am i sympathetic . Yes. It is important how the pandemic originated, it tells us things that we need to know about how to deal with this pandemic better, deal with the virus better, how to prevent the next pandemic and it is important in our attitudes toward science, the question of whether we need more science on dangerous viruses or less science on dangerous viruses. That is hugely important. We need to settle this with more certainty, but you do not always get certainty when a new virus spills over into humans. Sometimes, it takes a long time to get that certainty. One virus took 41 years. Ebola, it has been 47 years since the first known spillover and we still do not know the animal from which the ebola virus gets into humans. Host you mention your most recent breast seller recent bestseller breathless, i want to quote from that book. Sars prodethe most relevant predictor of the pandemic future and one scientist who heeded the clue was a chinese for all adjust verologist. Her decades of work on coronavirus began haphazardly during her university years, eventually bringing her to International Renowned within the field and into a harsh spotlight during covid19. Who is she . Guest she is the leader of the coronavirus laboratory. She has 15, 20 years of experience working on coronavirus of that that have the potential to become human pathogens. She has studied them in her laboratory, she has done field collecting viruses and has written papers warning the world about the danger that those viruses could spill into humans and perhaps cause an epidemic or pandemic. She has been issuing that warning for 15 years and now it is sort of a case of attack the messenger. Because she has worked on these viruses, she is a character in some of the narratives about a lab leak possibility, people say she must have been working on a virus in her lab and it leaked from her laboratory and became the pandemic. She must have been working on the progenitor virus, the immediate ancestor of the sarscov2 virus. She has told john cowan and myself she was Never Working on progenitor virus, this virus in her laboratory. Can she prove it . It is hard to prove a negative. But that is where the state of accusations and evidence and circumstance and coincidence stand at this point. Host one more quote. One thing is nearly certain i believe amid the swirl of uncertainties, covid19 will not be our last pandemic of the 21st century. It probably will not be the worst. Guest we live in a world of viruses. Every animal, every plant, every bacteria, every fun guy on this planet has its own unique viruses. We are constantly coming into contact with the natural world, exploiting it, extracting resources from it, eating it, burning it. We are cutting down trees and capturing animals and exposing ourselves to new viruses. There are influenza viruses that circulate in birds, they all come from wild aquatic birds. We are hearing about high pathogenicity avian influenza, bird flu. Bird flu could become the next pandemic tomorrow or maybe never. If it acquires a few mutations, a few adaptations that make it capable not just infecting birds and making them sick, and occasionally infecting mammals, seals and sea lions, dolphins, foxes. It has been doing that. It has not yet become a mammal flu capable of transmitting. If it does, with four or five new mutations, then it could become the next terrifying pandemic virus. Or, it might be something else. It might be another coronavirus. It might be a virus of the measles family, it might be of the sort that is not on our radar screen. Theres a certain kind of viruses, singlestranded. They have genomes consisting of rna, which is unstable and makes mistakes when it replicates itself, instead of ones that consist of dna, the double helix, which is stable. Rna viruses are the dangerous ones because they mutate frequently, evolve quickly and have the capacity to jump from one kind of host to another. The influenzas, rna. Host let us go to the subtitle of restless, the scientific race to defeat the deadly virus. What did we do differently when it came to covid19 to get shots in arms . Guest i had an interesting conversation with tony fauci. Some people say well, you really worked quickly. You developed a new vaccine in 60 days, you are doing clinical trials. Within nine months, it was being used in people all over the country. We work quickly because we had done a lot of groundwork. We researched a new kind of vaccine for years, for more than a decade before that. The mrna vaccine concept, that is one of the things we did differently. Tony faucis people were working on the idea of mrna vaccines, which can be modified, developed, customize for a new virus very quickly. Produced and gotten into arms. Millions of lives have been saved by the vaccines we produce. Two of them that i can think of offhand, this kind of vaccine. Also, the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine from england has been a very effective vaccine, that uses a different kind of vaccine methodology. We developed vaccines more quickly by far than had ever been done before and saved millions of lives. We did not do everything right in terms of dealing with this pandemic. But vaccines we did well, they did well, the scientists. Host how did you get into this line of work . Guest i am still asking myself that question. I started off english major who wanted to be a novelist and published my first novel young because i had a story and was lucky and was capable of executing it reasonably well. 53 years ago i published my first novel. 18 bucks total by now, about one book every three years for 53 years. Despite the fact there were some big gaps early on when i was paying my dues. But i turned to nonfiction in the late 70s and early 80s because i decided the world did not need me to be a novelist. I was a middleclass white kid from a happy childhood in ohio. I did not have deeply experienced, deeply felt stories to tell and knowledge in general of the human condition. I was interested in science and the natural world, so i started writing nonfiction for magazines. I figured out how to become a freelance magazine writer in the late 70s and early 80s, started writing about Natural History than more about biological sciences. Evolutionary biology, conservation biology. Then i started writing books about those subjects and in 1999, National Geographic asked me to take a walk across the congo basin with and explore who was gonna walk for 2000 miles, through the last great forest of the congo basin. National geographic wanted a series of stories on that, so they assigned a great photographer, a colleague of mine, and myself to go with this fellow on sections of his walk do the swamps in forest, crossing the rivers in river sandals and shorts, sleeping on the ground, eating whatever we could carry with help from some African Field assistance. At one point, we walk through 10 days through ebola habitat. We still do not know the reservoir host, the animal in which the ebola virus lurks. We knew it was in this forest because there had been outbreaks in human villages along the edge of this particular forest block. For 10 days, we walked through ebola habitat wondering where the virus was and noticing it was beautiful forest, great gorilla habitat, but there were no guerrillas. No signs of guerrillas, no gorilla poop, no gorilla tracks or nests. The guerrillas were all gone. It is known that gorillas and chimpanzees are susceptible to a bola as well as humans, so this is the place that was spookily empty of guerrillas, probably because of ebola, now we were walking through it. Where was the virus . In an animal somewhere. How did it get to humans . Your interaction in some way. I realized that his ecology and evolutionary biology. Human interaction with wild animals, new virus gets into a new host, ecology. The virus manages to adapt and transmit and become a human pathogen, evolutionary biology. So i realize i have been writing about ecology and evolutionary biology for 20 years, that is my wheelhouse. His scary new viruses that emerge into humans are a subcategory of ecology and evolutionary biology, i can write about that. So i started, i became a virus described beginning at that point. Host i want to read from your book from 2015, a short quote. Aids beg with the spillover from one chimp to one human. In or near the small southeastern wedge of cameroon, around 1908, give or take a margin of error. It grew slowly from a spill over to an outbreak to a pandemic. That leaves the third question. How . Guest i tell the story in that book, we do not know the details of the story. We know about the spillover of a new virus from one chimpanzee into one human in the southeastern corner of cameroon around 1908 because of hard science, wonderful hard science that has been done. Placing it in space and time. But how it got from that place to the worlds known only inferentially. I take some risk. I create hypothetical narrative, hypothetical character that i call the voyager and based on a lot of careful research i did on the ground in those places, floating down some of the rivers in dugout canoes talking to people and going to market, i create hypothetical narrative around what others have called the cut hunter hypothesis. A hunter kills a chimpanzee, butchers it. He has a cut on his hand or his back and gets blood to blood contact with the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee virus gets into him. The real patient zero, not the guy who was an Airline Steward out of canada in the book. But the real patient zero was this first person in the southeastern corner of cameron who got blood to blood contact in the virus found it could replicate in him and could transmit from him into others. It worked its way down the river in people to the big cities of the central congo at that time. From those cities, it got amplified in spread to the world. Host 1908, it was not until 1979, 1980 that aids became a thing. Old wide, right . Worldwide, right . Guest right, it was hard to detect. It was moving slowly, killing people slowly. It is a very particular, peculiar kind of virus. It is very fiendishly patient. Life is hard in the congo, life is hard in the southeastern corner of cameroon. I have been there, i promise you that life is hard. People have very few ways to make a living, people struggle. People suffer malaria, people die young. Life expectancy is not high. For those reasons, this phenomenon was invisible for a long time. This very slow virus was transmitting from one human to another, many of those people probably died of other causes for the could have immune failure. But not before they managed to pass the virus along to someone else and the virus spread and was amplified. I tell this story in the book, i do not know if youll me to go into that. But amplified through the blood products industry. Once it got to haiti. How did it get to haiti . When the democratic republic of the congo became independent in 1960, all of the belgian colonial professionals were told to get out and go home. It was understandable. Great initial leader of the newly independent congo, than a fellow who took over in 1965 wanted the colonial professionals gone. So who came in to help the congo and fill the breach . Frenchspeaking africans from other parts of the world, including haiti. Haitian doctors, haitian lawyers, haitian teachers who went as a support mission to the congo and lived there for some years. And had lives wives and girlfriends and acquired the infection, presumably. Then, the haitians went back. He wanted to africanize, the haitians went home and took infection with them. That is why haiti was initially one of the hotspots in the early discovery detection of hivaids, then there were people selling their blood serum in plasma extraction centers in haiti. The blood serum was being extracted and the red cells put back into them, the plasma turned into a product that had a various medical uses and was being shipped up to miami. There was a very large trade in blood plasma from haiti to the united states. This would have been the late 1960s, early 70s. Carrying the virus, presumably to the u. S. And onward to the world. I say presumably out of caution. Some of this is strongly inferential. Host hivaids existed beginning circa 1908 and it survived. We in the west are not aware of it until the late 70s, early 80s. Welcome to book tv, this is the monthly in depth program. This month is David Quammen and we are looking at his body of work as he mentioned earlier, 18 books in total. Here are a few of them. Song of the dodo came out in 1996, monster of god the man eating predator in the jungles of history came out in 2003. The reluctant mr. Darwin, an intimate portrait of Charles Darwin and a making of his theory of evolution in 2006. Spillover, which we have talked about. Animal infections and the next human pandemic. Ebola followed that. How aids emerged from an african forest came out in 20 teen. A radical new history of life came out in 2019. His most recent bestseller, the scientific race to defeat a deadly virus, came out last year. Coming out shortly as the heartbeat of the wild, dispatch from landscape of wonder, peril and hope. It is a collection of essays from the National Geographic. We spent about a half hour talking with him and want to make sure you get the opportunity with your questions and comments. We are putting the phone numbers on the screen. You can also make comments on several social media site, just remember booktv. We will get to those in just a few minutes. Are all viruses zoo nautica zoonotic . Guest you are using it correctly as a question, the answer is no. All viruses in humans well, i do not want to make a categorical statement. But as far as i can think, all viruses that infect humans are probably zoonotic in origin because we are a relatively young species. As i have said, everything comes from somewhere. Even viruses that are unique to humans i think of smallpox and measles. There are a few others that are not known to exist in any other animals. But they are closely related to things that exist in other animals. Smallpox is related to cowpox and other kinds of box. Formerly monkeypox. Measles is related to a kind of virus in africa. It is likely even the viruses that seem unique to us have animal origins, origins in other animals, over the great length of time. Host we talked about viruses, you have different categories of diseases or contagions that carry a fungi. Could you help us with those . Guest some of those are obvious. Everyone knows we get bacterial infections, we get fungal infections. Prions are a very peculiar counterintuitive unique form of infectious agent. They are not living creatures. They are proteins that are misfolded, a long molecular structure that has holes in it. If you fold it in a certain way, it becomes nonfunctional. We have proteins in our brains that must be folded in a certain way. If we get infected with a prion, a misfolded version of that, contact with the proteins in our brain causes them to flap and they become this folded. Almost like dominoes falling. That creates aggregations of misfolded proteins that gives you a problem such as mad cow disease. That is what mad cow disease is, it is caused by one of the prions. Ms. Folding proteins and eventually rotting your brain away. The technical term protozoans, that encompasses creatures that cause malaria. Those are the little nasty bugs that cause malaria, they are carried by mosquitoes from human to human and, in some rare situations, from animal to human. There is one kind of malaria that is presently still genuinely zoonotic that is being passed to humans by way of mosquitoes. Host finally, worms. Guest worms crawl in and out. We are infected with various kinds of worms that cause worm diseases. Ringworm, for instance in humans. These diseases that cause terrible disfiguring of people. Those are caused by worms, they are generally carried by biting flies. Host why do we not have malaria in the states . Guest washington, d. C. Used to be a hotbed of malaria. People talk about, we have got to go to washington and drained the swamps. That is a metaphor. In the old days, that was literal. Swamps were drained, the mosquitoes that carry malaria were no longer able to reproduce to lay eggs on standing swamp water and have the eggs hatch. We managed to get rid of malaria in the area. During the building of the panama canal, malaria and yellow fever or a terrible problem for workers. It is possible to eradicate or reduce malaria by taking away the conditions mosquitoes who carry malaria need. We have not yet managed to develop a vaccine against the actual bugs that cause malaria, something bill and Melinda Gates worked on for a long time, much to their credit. Still do not have a malaria vaccine. Now with climate change, we have conditions that allow mosquitoes to start moving into the higher latitudes. Laces are warmer that used to be too cold for mosquitoes to survive through the winter. So mosquito borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever, which causes terrible debility among millions around the world, those diseases are moving northward. Host how does a mosquito get the malaria virus . Guest it gets it from a human. Mosquito gets infected with the malaria protozoan by biting a human that is carrying it. It is a back and forth, same with yellow fever. Virus is a complex greater, but compared to the malarial bug, it is simple. The more the malarial parasites have this extraordinarily complex lifecycle that involves going through one stage of life in a human host and circulating the blood then bursting out of the liver and circulating the blood again, then being picked up by a mosquito who then gets the human blood in her belly with malarial parasites. The parasites go through another metamorphosis in the mosquito then get into her salivary glands and she goes to fight another human, the plasmodium comes rushing down and gets into the humans. It is back and forth. Host with your 400 plus days trekking through the african drum goal, did you get malaria jungle, did you get malaria . Guest i only walked 53 days over the course of about four trips. The explorer that we were following, a great scientist, great conservationist, one of the toughest people physically and intellectually i have ever met, he has had malaria numerous times. My photographer has had it. Ive been lucky, and all of my travels in tropical forests i have never had malaria. Partly because of modern medical science. I generally am in those places only for two to four weeks at a time and i can take the antimalarial drugs that protect you from infection with malaria. Every time i would go off on a trip, i would go to my doctor and get a prescription, get these pills and would take the pills while i was in malarial territory and was lucky never to get it. If you take the pills 365 days a year, it is unhealthy for you. They can destroy your liver i am not sure exactly what it is. You cannot take them if you are a longterm resident of those areas. Host is it wrong to say that most africans in Subsahara Africa have had malaria . Guest i do not know, but it is plausible to me. Certainly, people who live in Central Africa into Southern Africa have high jeopardy of contracting malaria and their children have a high jeopardy of dying of malaria. I cannot remember the latest numbers, i think it is between 600000 and one Million People a year who die of malaria. Most of those are children in subsaharan africa. That is why bill and Melinda Gates among others say one of the best things that can be done in this world is to find a way of protecting children from malaria. Medicines you can take once you have malaria to temper the fever , those are important. But a vaccine would be vastly valuable. Host when i was in africa, i remember talking about different people and saying malaria is just like getting a bad flu. Guest if you are lucky, yes. If you are unlucky, you are dead. If you are a child who weighs 40 pounds, you are more likely to be unlucky. Especially if you are undernourished. Host where does smallpox fit into this . It has been eradicated. Guest it has, it is a virus that survives frozen in a few laboratories around the world. But it has been eradicated since i think 1979. Why is it smallpox could be eradicated and malaria cannot . Why is it these other diseases have not been eradicated . That is a complex question, the first answer is smallpox was not a disease. It was not hiding in other animals as well as infecting humans. Once we got a smallpox vaccine that was effective and we had an International Campaign to get everybody vaccinated, we eventually drove the virus extinct in the wild among humans and it was not surviving in any animal hosts that could reinfect humans the way yellow fever reinfect siemens. Polio, we have almost eradicated polio. But we have never quite gotten there. It is a virus, it circulates only in humans. We have not managed to get those last few populations vaccinated. This was the latest i have heard, there was a continuation of sporadic polio cases i want any of these countries to forgive me if my memory is wrong. I think nigeria, pakistan and afghanistan. If we could get everybody vaccinated, that virus would be gone. Host where did smallpox come from, how did they develop . Guest smallpox probably came from animals, probably related to cowpox. That still circulates. Herbivores. Hoofed herbivores. Such as gazelles, various kinds of antelope in africa. Big antelope. Host wouldnt that make it zoonotic . Guest it has been in humans long enough it has evolved to be distinct. That is why i said there is a judgment call, a quantitative distinction, rather than a qualitative distinction. How long has it been in humans . Long enough to look like a unique virus . Smallpox has been in humans and measles, which i talked about measles has been in humans long enough to be considered but it had to come from somewhere. Host michael in florida, please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller yes, thank you for your books. My question is in regards to competition. In regard to your knowledge of Evolutionary Development and biology, in terms of competition we are neglecting cooperation and i am afraid we have done it not only in economics, and only in our educational system, but in science itself. We neglect the mitochondria thing in the fact there is cooperation and evolution does not optimize our entire educational system and Economic System is based on this. Cooperation means those viruses may be projecting outwards from the very first cooperation. They may be projecting outward into neurobiology and culture, a balance between selfinterest and group interest. Host are you a scientist by trade . Caller i am, more in the hard sciences. But i have taught. One of the things you realize, like the second book from the first book, the tree of life led us to all of the mistakes we made that led to the second book , basic genocide where we disregarded basic science in lieu of politics. Host a lot on the table, what would you like to respond to . Guest you have a lot of interesting ideas, i will respond to a couple of them. You mentioned cooperation and competition. Two ideas that seem to be diametrically opposed. You are right in the darwin theory of evolution, competition is very important. Species compete individuals of a given population compete with one another for survival, resources, reproductive opportunities. They compete with one another and those who happen to have adaptations that give advantages survive and those advantages become adaptations that are genetically programmed into that lineage. Competition is clearly important. As the great 20th century microbiologist pointed out, among others, competition is not the only thing going on in terms of interactions among creatures. There is also cooperation. I write about this in my book, about wonderful woman i was fortunate to know a little bit. Her theories of how cooperation has brought together new possibilities in the evolutionary history of life. The very cells our bodies are composed of our composites of earlier life forms. This is what you are alluding to with mitochondria. Earlier life forms that became embedded, subcellular forms became embedded and became the complex cells with a nucleus and mitochondria. That made complex life possible. Absolutely, cooperation has been hugely important in the evolutionary history of life, back 2 billion years. And competition is very important in Natural Selection of adaptations that creates evolutionary shapes we see among different creatures. That is not everything you alluded to, but that is about the best i can do. Host cornelius is in louisiana, good afternoon. Caller good afternoon. It seems like we all have biblical names and stuff. I believe in the bible, i was a military Police Officer and i trained at a fort in Chemical Warfare and biological warfare. I think that came from the wuhan lab and was sent out on purpose. You are talking about the bat lady, i cannot pronounce her name. But dr. Robert malone said they are using mrna technology not the way he wanted it used and stuff. Dr. Fauci gave them money, taxpayer money, to look at the virus. President obama said he did not want the gain of function, but did predict in 2014 because there is a clip saying in the next five years, there would be a virus. Dr. Fauci said during the Trump Administration there would be a virus. Host we got a lot there and a lot of names, we are going to let David Quammen respond to your thoughts. Guest thank you for your statement, your ideas. You are certainly entitled to believe whatever you want to believe about the origins of this virus and i know what you are alluding to, talking about ecohealth alliance, research being done at the Wuhan Institute and the lab. If you choose to read my book breathless, i go into that in great depth and go into the more recent evidence in the new piece i have written over the last two months that will describe the evidence. One of the most important things to say is although a lab leak cannot be dismissed out of hand and needs to be considered, to say that a lab leak occurred from the lab at the Wuhan Institute of virology is to go well beyond the evidence. It is an accusation, very serious accusation, and it is not supported by evidence i am aware of. For instance, was she ever working on a virus that is nearly identical with the covid19 virus . She has said no to me and a couple other journalists she has not talked to many journalists. But more important, there is evidence she never had this virus in her lab. I describe the evidence in this new piece, a little too complicated to go into. But she has been in the business of finding dangerous new coronaviruses in bats and warning the world about them in scientific journal papers, publishing what she has found. She never published this virus. If she had found the virus in 2019, 2017, she could have gotten a journal article on the cover of the journal nature, this is how she makes her living. This is how she develops a reputation. She has incentive not to keep a virus like the secret, but to publicize a virus like this, if she was working on it. There is more evidence related to that in the piece i will be publishing sometime this summer. Host cornelius also mentioned dr. Robert malone, we have gotten a couple Text Messages him. Who is that . Guest i do not know, maybe i should. But there are a lot of people working on this, a lot of people have opinions. A lot of people have been doing research on this. If i should know the work of robert malone, i apologize. But he has not been among the scientists on my radar. Host a text message, could you talk a little bit about your relationship with Charles Darwin and the history of evolution. In his view, the illustrated origin of species is the definitive version and your tangled tree brings a story into the 21st century area century. Guest darwin has been important to me ever since i started reading about him back in the 1970s. I was asked eventually by an editor friend of mine to write a short book, short biography on Charles Darwin. That became my book the reluctant mr. Darwin published in 2006. That was the only time i have ever written a book on assignment. A wonderful editor was developing a series of concise literary biographical books to be no longer than about 200 pages. He asked me, would you do darwin . There have been great long biographies of darwin, a great biography by janet brown. Other 800 page biographies. I said, how could i compete with them . He said they are not your competition, they are your sources. Write us the story of darwin in less than 200 pages and so i took the assignment and decided the way to do this was to focus very closely on darwins letters. I got the multivolume Cambridge University collected letters of Charles Darwin and started going through his letters at different stages of his life and started reading his notebooks from when he was a young man just back from the voyage of the beagle who had the idea it is possible species evolve from one to another, but did not have a theory of how that might occur. This was from 1836 to 1838 if i remember correctly, living as a young man in london back from his great Adventure Sailing around the world, getting this idea and quietly he lived in london as a bachelor in a little house going to the British Museum and other museums, looking over his notes and finally hit on the idea of evolution by Natural Selection. I decided that as the door when i want to write about, i want to write about him as a person, fundamentally conservative man who found himself burdened by a radical idea and struggled with that. When he became engaged to a woman who was very religious, she struggled with that because this idea of evolution seemed to challenge conventional anglican religion within the culture where they lived. It was a very threatening idea, but darwin was so courageous and devoted to honesty. He pushed through all of this danger, all of this unacceptability, all the radical nest of this idea. Took him more than 20 years and he wrote a great book on the origin of species and published it in 1859. When i wrote my biography, i wanted to stay close to him as a person. What did it feel like to be a young man who had an idea, did not know where to go, new he was going to upset his teachers who were clergyman, knew he would upset his wife, push forward with anyway . So i told that story in the reluctant mr. Darwin, that is where the title comes from. He was reluctant, but stubborn. Host you come in at 250 pages, 30 pages of footnotes. Guest i went a little over. [laughter] host i got the idea he was pretty physically the whole evolution of thought in his mind, especially losing his faith. Guest yes. It was emotionally taxing and apparently physically taxing. Darwin had a mysterious illness. Ever since he came back from the voyage, one theory is he got bit by a particular kind of biting bug, called a kissing bug if i recall correctly. That carried a disease and he suffered all of his life from it. There are other theories about the mysterious illness, some that it was caused by stress. Whatever it was, he would become terribly ill, he would have the shakes, feel feverish. He would be nauseous and vomit. Charles darwin probably vomited more than any other great man in history. He had a bucket behind the screen in his office where he could vomit when he needed to. He would go to health spas, he would take the cold water baths, they would wrap him in wet towels. He would go through all of this stuff trying to deal with this illness. After he published on the origin of species, when he started to write not about the evolution of animals and human evolution, he started to write books about the evolution of plants. Sexual reproduction in orchids. The movements and habits of climbing plants. It was less controversial and his symptoms started to go away when he lived to the age of 73 and died of congestive heart failure. To the end, a quiet, unassuming conservative man who had brought into the world a very radical idea that was troubling to his whole family, his whole social class, also to him. But he brought it through anyway. I loved it when i saw this pattern. Once he started working on plants, things quieted down. Things got a little more comfortable for him. He could keep his lunch down. Host what was the reaction when on the origin of species came out . Guest it was a bestseller in its time. That did not mean exactly what it means today. I think his publisher printed about 1250 copies of the book in the first printing and they were sold out from the bookseller on the date of publication, meaning at the wholesale level. Then it started to get reviewed and some people thought this is wonderful, this is mind blowing, world changing. Some people said it was rubbish. Atheistic. So there was a lot of controversy through the rest of the 19th century and even into the early 20th century, people were arguing this cannot be true. It cannot be random mutation competition. It has to be something more, it has to be guided, there has to be a Mysterious Force that leads creatures toward greater complexity. Around the 1920s and 1930s, modern genetics, the beginnings of modern genetics was added to darwinian evolutionary theory and scientists created what is called the new synthesis, the modern synthesis of darwinian theory. Improved yes, this is right. He had it right all along. Host when did Charles Darwin use the phrase survival of the fittest . Guest it is not his phrase. It is a famous phrase, a good phrase. He probably would have used if you had thought of it. That phrase came from the science popularizer and social critic herbert spencer, who fell in love with darwinism and wrote a lot about it and popularized it and spencer was an englishman, but came to the u. S. , did a lecture tour. He brought darwinian evolutionary theory in a personal way to the u. S. And he went a bit too far, because he was also the developer of what is called a social darwinism, the idea we should think in human social relations. We should think about how important this is and organize social structures accordingly. Darwin never said that. Darwin never said his Natural Selection would make humans better. Therefore, we should let it happen. We should let the unfortunate souls starve to death and not be educated, because social darwinism was going to create a better human being. That is you herbert spencer, not Charles Darwin. Host you are on with David Quammen. Caller thank you for taking my call. In the current the covid pandemic, what places, what country, what state had the best approach to it . What places did not . When it broke out, everybody all over the world, Different Countries try different methodology. I am just wondering, have we gone through enough now to know what works, what doesnt, what we can use in the future when another epidemic hits . Which seems, from what i have heard, almost certain . Guest that is a very interesting question and something i have wondered about from the beginning of covid19 myself. How would this pandemic virus due in Different Countries, with different social structures, different Public Health systems, different methods of response with different history . We know the way it played out that at least in the beginning, countries that had very strong Public Health systems and strong governments that imposed strong restrictions and Public Health measures did well. Mandatory quarantining, things like that. Singapore, south korea, japan, the islands of new zealand. They did well at the beginning in controlling it. New zealand did well because on an island, it is easier to keep an infection out. There were Public Health measures that were put into place in those places that worked very well, at least in the beginning. Singapore had the advantage of having experienced a terrible outbreak of the original sars virus, the original human killer coronavirus in 2003. It hit singapore hard, it scared them to death. They responded well and were ready to respond again when this coronavirus hit. Over longer periods of time, because the virus is so adaptive, so enterprising, so patient, tony fauci said to me this is an insidious and nefarious virus and he was right. It is an extraordinarily fermentable virus. Over time, even countries such as singapore, south korea have had their turns at being hard hit by this virus and having waves of infection. At the very beginning, i thought, what is going to happen when the virus gets into places where there has been a history of civil war . Challenges to the Public Health system . People are underserved because of lack of resources and lack of stable government in the Public Health sector . What is going to happen when this virus hits the capital of the democratic republic of the congo . There are great scientists in the democratic republic of the congo. Because of decades of civil war and extraction of resources and other problems, their social safety net is not as strong as ours. The Public Health system is not as strong. I thought the capital of that country was going to be pummeled by covid19 and it seems it has not been. That the caseload in the democratic republic of the congo has not been insignificant, but it has been much lower than expected. That is a mystery scientists are still working on. Is it because the population generally is younger . They have a younger demographic and fewer elderly people than the u. S. Or italy . That might be part of it. As a possible there was another coronavirus swept through Central Africa decades ago and gave people some acquired immunity to a similar coronavirus . It is possible, speculative. We do not know. The answers are still out on the diversity of patterns from country to country. We have learned some things, we have not learned enough and we have not learned why some countries have suffered much more than other countries. Host as you wrote in the new york times, no one should be misled to believe that covid is nothing to worry about. Deaths have been trending downward for more than a year, but as of last week, the disease was still killing at least 480 people per day. Whether that constitutes an emergency will now be an individual question, not a global one, depending on whether the next fatality is you or someone you love or a stranger. David incaller thank you for ty call. My question stems from being a u. S. History teacher in high school. Covid became so political. Political parties which politicians to this and to, whether or not you were patriotic. I want to hear your guest talk. This was a difficult time. Still is, dealing with issues of trusted politicians and how to behave, and politics. Out like to hear his comments on that. Guest i agree it is a tragedy that this pandemic has been politicized to the degree it has. I could tell from the beginning, could have imagined that when this pandemic spread there was going to be pension between fiscal liberties and Public Health. Public health, part of the definition is you organize social structures, medical responses, regulations, practices in different communities for the community gut. Good. Of that spectrum is individual liberties, what is right for me . Do i want to wear a mask . Can anybody make me . It was not surprising that it became politicized to a great degree, at least in this country , not only here, but especially in this country. Because of that tension between Community Welfare and individual rights and prerogatives. In addition, we had a president in early 2020 cannot remember his name but he threw fat on the fire in connection with the virus that, as he said, was the china virus, the wuhan virus causing kung flu. Some cheap jokes, provocative statements, some sinophobia involved that made the political aspect of this all the worse. Now it is in congress. We have a select subcommittee to investigate the pandemic, including its origins. We have a Senate Committee that is weighing in. Witnesses are being called. It is good that elected leaders should be concerned, but i do not think that a committee of congress is the best possible mechanism for resolving the scientific question of the origins of this virus, especially when any committee in this era tends to be partisan and the choosing and calling of witnesses is a way of stacking the deck. I am going to be diplomatic and not go any farther, but i do not think that is getting us closer to a scientific solution. Host 50 minutes left in our discussion with David Quammen. 7488200 if you live in the easter central time zones. 7482001 you live in the mountain or Pacific Times is. To text, 2027488903. Please include your name and location. Caller thank you, cspan, for bringing us a guest like David Quammen and others who make us smarter. This is my favorite channel. David, i hope you can answer this. How much does religion get in the way of scientific and medical progress . How beneficial would it be if we taught evolution in schools . Thank you once again. Host before we get an answer from David Quammen, lets hear this. Mike, are you with us . He is gone. Guest thanks for that hand grenade, make. I will answer the second part. First, because it is more straightforward, absolutely. We need to teach evolutionary biology in schools. It is a very important lens onto the history of life on this planet. It is important not just for a sheer understanding but for medical science to reject the theory of evolution and to reject scientific medical research. We would not be able to keep up with the creation of new antibiotics or deal with antibioticresistant bacteria if we do not understand the ways in which darwinian evolutionary theory explains antibioticresistant bacteria. In terms of religion, i attacked the bit about how religion in the era of darwin, and the culture in which he lived, it was a rigorous and rigid form of religious ideology that dampens damned him and dismissed him. And in england in the mid19th century, the scientific establishment was mainly the same as the religious establishment. The teachers that darwin had in science at Cambridge University, people like adam sedgwick, were anglican ministers themselves. Cambridge was essentially a divinity school. Youve graduated from Cambridge University, you became an anglican minister. That was what darwin that he was headed for, but he knew it was not right for him. So there was a very brittle challenge between darwinian evolutionary theory and the religious establishment in which he left. Nowadays, religious thinking, come of it some of it, is more resilient, more flexible, less concerned with saying the earth is 6276 years old and all creatures on earth were created in their present form by individual acts of special creation by god. That is what religion was staying in darwins saying in darwins written. Religion generally in the modern world is not saying that, although some branches are. There have been popes and other religious leaders who say we must embrace science. We do not reject the theory of evolution. It depends on what religious tradition and what structure and sacked sect or organization youre talking about. Some are supportive, some are not. Host David Quammen, is a theory of evolution not taught in schools . I seem to remember learning about it. Guest it depends on the state. There are states who can think say we cannot want evolution taught as part of the substance of our public schools. It has been an issue in kansas, texas, other states. But there is no federal law that says evolution must be taught, must be part of the curriculum. Evolutionary biology is generally not time in medical schools either. Not for the same reasons. I have asked medical educators about this. I have said, wouldnt it be valuable for people become doctors to learn about of missionary biology . The answer is, they are busy. They do not get much sleep. The curriculum is already crowded. I and others are more qualified to talk about how to organize medical education yes, it would be useful if there more evolutionary biology taught in medical schools. Host this hear from jeff in new york. Caller good afternoon. David quammen, i heard your comments about appropriations covid. Perhaps in south korea, and almost all the other nations, they never had a national lockdown, never shut down their economy. Yet, the first year of the pandemic, their mortality rate was basically one death to every 18 american deaths. Over the last three years five deaths for each. Host what would you like David Quammen to comment on . Caller the reason i am mentioning that is because we should go to school and what they did right. That is the most important thing. Thank you. Guest i think your point about south korea. You know the statistics better than i do. I have not say that specifically or recently. But, we have to be careful to the degree that we generalize results from one country to another, because you have to consider a lot of things besides whether there is a total shutdown, whether there is mandatory quarantine or not. You have to consider the demographic structure, how many elderly people you have, how much trouble there is, how easily travel is controlled, how the economy and Education System and medical care system function. I cannot disagree. It is not safe to say south korea had no shutdowns, they did this and that. Therefore, the model of south korea would have been right for the u. S. , brazil, northern italy. I am not willing to go that far. Host a followup to karen in syracuse, she texted, didnt they use hydroxychloroquine the related to blunt covid . Guest i would say the answer is no. Hydroxychloroquine has been used widespread widespread use is been involved with antimalarial prophylaxis. I took corwin in the 19th i take it in the 1980s when i would go to africa. It was antimalarial. But it is never been shown to be of any positive value in dealing with the covid19 virus. There are problems, side effects. The degree to which there is overlap between use of chloroquine or hydrocarbon for antimalarial purposes in the democratic republic of congo and the statistics, they are relatively low incidence of covid cases and mortalities. I have not seen anything scientific. I would be interested if there was something, but i am skeptical. Host from gary in arizona, text message, starting in in re 2020, i began daily checks at the cdc, johns hopkins, and the british and ancient online. How well do you think these sites perform . Certainly there are websites evolved . Guest their websites evolved. The university of washington, the next website on, and became valuable. I am more familiar with that than with the particular sites that gary mentioned, with the exception of johns hopkins, which seemed valuable. Host we love your books text message. Would you tell us how it literature scholar faulkner became so astute and highly Technical Sciences and able to translate these to the general public . Then it either gets cut off or they did not give a city in the state like they are supposed to. Guest whoever that is, i appreciate the question. I started my career i have already mentioned this is a fiction writer, novelist. To my first and second books, i did a graduate degree on the structure and the novels of william faulkner. I am deeply listed in faulkner was deeply interested in faulkner for about 11 years. It was not completely irrelevant to my later career writing about science, writing long, complicated books about things like island geography and extinction. Or in the tangled tree, i wrote about molecular genetics, the redrawing of the tree of life. These are long, complicated books filled with scientific facts. In the stories, and they are carefully structured, although they are not obviously structured, they are structured in a way that i hope draws the reader forward, picking up one thread of a mystery story and shifting to another place and time, cleaning up another threat of a scientific story picking up another thunder bay center stripe. And tingles all of them with threads of narrative, history, and science. I have said this before. I do not think i wouldve been able to structure those books if i had not spent years looking closely at the novels of the involved or novels of william faulkner. Absalom, absalom turned out to be great training. Host where are you doing your writing . How do you do your notetaking in a canoe on the congo river . Guest i am a letter to guy. A low tack guide. I go out with a cutdown ring notebook. I literally would take scissors the navy for a trip and cut pages and cardboard the night before a trip and cut pages and cardboard so we would fit in a ziploc bag. Closing ziploc bag, rubber band around the bag. That would be a my body. I would be in shorts and sandals. Going across the swamp or swimming across a Blackwater Lagoon in the middle of the forest. My note that would be safe and dry. When i came out on the far side, i could open these about bag and scribble some notes about what just happened. In the tent at night, i would bathe any stream or a puddle of half clearwater, driver of the fire, climb into light tent, wake up clean and write about 4 30 and a. M. I would have scratches and cuts and blistered. I would spread iodine over the blisters, put pieces of clean paper and duct tape over them. I would put up my sandals, shorts and be ready to hike. Host where do you live . Guest bozeman, montana. In a house on the south side of bozeman between mainstreet and the university. I can walk downtown, walked to the university, writing my back to the grocery store, ski in the winter ride my bike to the grocery store, ski in the winter. I am retired from some of the other, more adventuresome, robust sports i did in earlier days white water kayaking. I am still an avid skier. I no longer play the ice hockey. Host where do you do your writing . Bozeman . Guest wonderful office and our house lined with books. I have got my file cabinets. Journal papers are piled up on the desk. It is that night notebooks and field journals that i keep piled up. Big pictures of Charles Darwin currently resting on the floor behind the. Behind me. In another corner of the room is a large plexiglas tank containing our rescue python. Host how old is he . Guest we do not know but we have had boots for 5 years. He was with a family that had young boys for about 10 years. Then the boys grew up, left the house and the mother said, the python is got to go. My wife heard about that, what does this monday and said, cannot get mad at me, but i have adopted a python. She is a you and grew up around zoos and nature, studied science, cares about conservation, love stinks. She said, jacket met me, but i have adopted a python. My only question was what species . That is what passes for collaborative decisionmaking at our house. Host his goods happy in a cage . Guest seems to be. He is a gentle soul, hides most of the day. Pepsi comes out, climbs around. Sometimes he comes out of his hooch. Sometimes i open the tank, let him climb out and he climbs my bookshelves. He can climb. I have book shows that go higher than me and he has submitted them. He will go behind books and nessel in there. These pythons have this habit of wedging themselves in little spaces, presumably in Southern Africa they would wedging through rocks to protect themselves from predators. Boots which is himself into bookshelves. I have defined event the end of the day. Back in his tank. Host pythons are squeakers . Guest tweezers, yet. All pythons or notoriously gentle are notoriously gentle. And i recommend that anybody go to a pet store and buy one i do not recommend that anybody go doing that store and buy one. Boots was a rescue. He was already living in human presence. We rescued him. His original name was zeus. As we left the house after picking him up, my wife said we should name him something that sounds a little less pretentious but maybe something that sounds like zeus in case he can recognize his name. She said how about boots . Host have you ever lost a notebook or youre out there . What is the scariest thing that ever happened to you . Guest i have never lost a notebook in a jungle. I did this one once on an assignment writing a story. I put the notebook on top of a car and drove away. That famously cover trip. I hated losing a notebook after having the interview. I have been very careful since then. My notebook is always on my body if im on a plane flying home. The scariest thing that ever happened to me was one of the times i got charged by an elephant. There was a time in northern kenya when a very eminent elephant biologist and i took a walk in an area where we should not have been walking. We should have been in a land rover. It was the savannah area. We ran into a female elephant with a calf. She trumpeted and charged. She gave a great blast of anger with her trunk. I do not know if they blast their trunks, come to think of it. I am there with ian douglas hamilton, Great Elephant researcher. We both take off running as fast as we can on the desert scrub. After 20 steps, he turns, sticks out his arms and goes, ahh to this element than to try to bluff her. This has worked for him in the past but did not work that day. She kept charging. Now i have got 20 steps on him. I run around a big bush and stopped in the grass. He comes running on a big bush, the elephant comes running, catches him with her trunk as she is three quarters of the wear on, lifts him up, throws him through the air, i hear his voice in what seems like a calm, declarative tone saying, help. He lands in the grass, she steps forward and with her tasks tusks jams down at him. That is the scariest thing i have ever experienced. I just got ian douglas hamilton, Great Elephant biologist, kyl. It is on me. She backs off, i come running up, i look at him on the ground. We both start going like this to see if he has been eviscerated, no, not a scratch. His watch is gone, glasses gone. Se stands out, there are these two tusk holes in the hard desert clay right where he was that were driven in six or seven inches. He says, david, she is still there. She has not left. We got him on his feet and we got out of there. And we made a cup of tea at camp and talked about it. Host this is all recounted in a heartbeat of the wild. One of the chapters. Host next call for David Quammen is from mike in detroit. Caller i agree so much when it comes to evolutionary biology. The original vaccines, you attenuate the virus, and people develop natural immunity. But in this case, i want your opinion. I read about a year before about the function programs that they were used to bypass the antibiological warfare with the idea that you developed biological warfare so you can develop an antibiological warfare. It makes sense but depends on what country youre dealing with. I wondered what you thought of that, because it seems like this accident in wuhan, a test tube did not follow the window. I am wondering what you thought about this developings biological warfare. Host we have touched on this a bit. Guest i agree with part of the senate, but what accident in wuhan . There is no evidence of an accident. Event might have been a Laboratory Related accident there might have been a Laboratory Related accident the release of this virus but no evidence that that happened so far. Gina function research. That is controversial. It is an easy label. You imagine doing some sort of research on the virus or some sort of agent and gains a function, gains an increase in transmissibility among humans, but the biologist virologist avenue talk to state againa function is a useless term. It is broad. A lot of research has been done on viruses in order to understand how they function. That includes viruses that are not human disease viruses. It is a catchall term that has become a kind of club to beat virologists over the head and to imply that all research is bio defense or bio weapons research. That is not the case. I cannot go into all the details of this it is a very complicated subject , but the u. S. Had a bio Weapons Program closed it down under richard nixon. We have not been doing active bio Agent Development Research Since then, to the best of my knowledge. Other countries have continued bio weapons efforts. But confuse that with the gentleman biological research or the understanding of viruses is to paint with a very broad brush. We should be careful about that. Host every author that appears on indepth, we ask him or her what their favorite books are, what they are currently reading . Here are some of David Quammens responses. Favorite books, william faulkner, absalom, absalom, Charles Darwin, on t origin of species, tolstoy, annaarenina, jensen, creation, and congo the epic history of a people. What is the horse book about . Guest the 8th day of creation, published in 1979 it is the First Comprehensive history of e rise of molecular biology. It is about watson, Francois Jacob and other brilliant scientists. It takes place in the late 40s into the 1960s. Essentially developing this whole field of molecular biology, of which one part was watson encrypt solving watson and crip solving the dna molecules and rosalyn franklins work and another fellow during research that helped people understand what the genetic molecule is, how it is structured, and how it works. Fascinating book. Host along with his favorite books, he sent us this note another i want to mention, which i started reading before the National Book award and hope to get back to you soon, Robert Samuels his name was george floyd. He goes on to say this and i love them. They are a clever and interesting organizing conversational principle. They are exclusive as well as inclusive, though, and that is not good. There are so many fine books a person could be reading. Mary kingsleys troubles in west africa, is it when my fever books . No. Is it charming . Yes. And who does not learn from jim didion . Joan didion . And hemingway is out of fashion. Why . Guest well, he was one of the great exemplars of the adventurous mail. Male. Big american guy who goes to africa, spain, drinks a lot of wine, was a big game hunter, she 12 animals and shoot wild animals and berries five women and wincing about price prize. He wrote some great books and had a unique style in its poetic simplicity. The book that i mentioned a movable feast is his memoir written very late in his life. He says at the end, this is what it was like in paris when we were young, poor and happy. It has the best of hemingway. And has a reflective aspect to it after the great successes and inventions. He would expect on himself as a young man trying to make it as a writer in paris. He does a beautiful piece of work, but the rest of that was sometimes called the hemingway meth. Myth. We have gotten over that. Host currently reading by david quamn, heather cox richardson, history of the repubca party, john meacham and Jonathan Lear. Mr. Lears book, tell us about it . Guest i am only little ways into it, but Jonathan Lear it is a humanely written but deeply informed meditation about mourning, what it means to come to an end, woody needs to look back in our lives, what it needs to think about the formative moments in our lives near the end of our lives. Jonathan layer was at el Jonathan Lear was at yale five years ago. He was one of the source gathering of. He was one of the smartest guys i knew. He was an editor of the journal i wrote for briefly. At, Jonathan Lear is going to go off and be one of americas pleading journalist. He will be an editor, writer. He wilruthe new yorker. Aturned out to be david grumbach. David remnick. But that is what i expected from this fellow. Instead, after a period at Cambridge University, he became a professional philosopher and a psychoanalyst. He knows things from plato to freud that few other people know. And he also has a broad interest in peoples and cultures and a close relationship with people of the chrome reservation in eastern montana. Crow reservation in eastern montana. He is bit they written a book about that. As recently when he was coming back from visiting his friends on the reservation. Had a wonderful reunion them. Not too long after that, i started reading this book you mentioned. Host youve dropped a couple of hints and i am been doing some math. That puts you in the 73 77yearold range. Am i right . Guest 75. Host next call for 75yearold David Quammen. Caller good afternoon. Thank you for taking my call. We are having a discussion in the country today. I would like to ask your guests this question. How many genders are there . Listeners need to be educated. How many genders are there today . Host is that something you address it all . Guest it is not. Thank you for another hand grenade. I am not going to answer that russian. That question. I am going to let everyone personally decide what gender they are or whether they reject the idea of the assignment of genders. I have never read and that, never research that. Thanks, robert. I am not going to go on the record with that. I have great sympathy for every person being able to say to what degree they genderidentified in whatever way. I am not going to set a number on how any traces they have. Host before i got off talking about your age and doing the math, on your reading list, there is a new novel rent the. Do you read fiction at all jacob guest i do but not often. I reread a play at the beginning of the pandemic and a few other novels recently. His gaze remained which, it escapes my mind which, but i probably read 20to1 nonfiction. In dean, silver spring, maryland. Caller have we evolved from several species of not land and gorillas . Thank you. Guest i cannot hear the very last thing. One of the most important things to understand about evolution is we did not evolve from any other kinds of primates living on this planet right now. We share deep ancestry with them but we did not evolve from monkeys or chimps. They are creatures that evolved over millions of years from a common ancestor that was some sort of mammal that began to have primate characteristics, flat face, ties pointed forward, other aspects, fingers, toes that were agile. 200,000 years ago or so, we share an ancestor with some sort of african preacher creature that shared an ancestor one million years before that with other forms of palm hom inoids. And millions of years before that, they shared an ancestor. They shared an ancestor with a creature that eventually led to the lineage that became gorillas and chimpanzees. No, we do not come from them directly any more than they come from us. Or millions of years, we have shared ancestors. Host next call, tino, connecticut. Please go ahead. Caller hello. I am professor emeritus, still working. I study hearing at a medical school in simonton, connecticut. My comment is, wouldnt it be nice if people taught comparative anatomy in high schools and colleges more often . Especially if we teach people about continuity and continuum of life and parts of our bodies and how they changed over time. And have them think about recapitulation. Teach the facts having to do assignments. And stay away from questions that are controversial that may actually stop people from learning about evolution. Guest i agree. It would be a wonderful idea to teach comparative anatomy, a bit of a blizzard biology, comparative anatomy. Its not have to be advanced. You can teach those things in high school, even grateful. Grade school. Teach our children and Young Students the connectedness of life on earth, yes. Comparative anatomy, where do i think of when you say comparative man me . Viewers might be interested to know that the flippers on a will have five figures on peach flavor. Why . Because they evolved from ancestors shared with all the rest of us animals that have digits like that. Host text message from d9 in flint, michigan fungi and human dna are closely related. Can fungi spores potentially be serious . Guest void. Top of my head, i do not see how that can happen. What was the cop the callers name . Host data. I am not sure what you are referring to, the degree to which humans share dna with fungi. I am sure there is some overlap, but fungal spores being a conduit for viruses affecting humans . Anything can be a conduit for a virus . A doorknob and conduct a virus on to a human hand and if you rub your eye, that virus might inject dry, might in fact your eye, but that is a a virus that has involved evolved to infect fungi, i do not see how that can affect human. The verses that affect humans are known to come almost without exception, if not totally without exception, from mammals and birds. Host one but we did not investigate is the heartbeat of the wild. One book we did not investigate is the heart of the wild. Guest it is based on the theories of my articles from National Geographic written about wildlife, wild places, and biological conservation over a period of 20 years, during which National Geographic, i was a contract writer for them, a contributing writer. They would hand me stories. They would say, david, you want to do liens of this era liens of the serengeti with your friend nick nichols is photographer . Of course. I would go off to wild places and Great Stories about creatures and ecosystems and conservation and the people doing the work and living there. Now, i have taken 21 of those articles and use them as the basis for a book that i hope is a unifying book. I have created a lot of new reporting on these stories, written a new forward and afterward talking about what we mean by wildness on this planet and what we mean by there being a heartbeat to the great wild places that are still intact, connected, functional. And they produced this book, the heartbeat of the wild. Host somebody you read about in the book is leon wilson. Guest he was a wonderful man. A terrific scientist, wonderful writer. A charming and generous man, a strong in runs on me and my thinking about conservation, strong influence. When i wrote about evolution and extinction on the islands, that was to a great degree inspired by the particular a particular ecological theory that ed wilson developed was robert macarthur, great theoretical ecologies. I was fortunate to become friends with ed wilson over the course of my interest in his work. I was asked to be the editor of the library of the americas in two volumes best of ed wilson, which came out about a year ago. We miss him greatly. He died on Christmas Day of 2021, anything. I think. Host one minute left. If somebody wanted to meet you introduce himself to your work, was the one book they should read . Guest peter, youre being too. Cruel. I would say breathless is a book on the coronavirus and the sense of it that i hope would be very valuable into the future for people what is to understand this pandemic. Heartbeat of the wild is close to my heart. If i had to mention it, i guess one more, it would be either the song of the dodo my most ambitious book or the chimp in the river, which is my smallest book. This is about the ecological origins of the aids virus. Host it is your best seller. Why would you not mention that . It came out in 20 oh. 2012. Guest it did. I am proud of it. Remember what we said . Host [laughter] author, journalist David Quammen has been our guest for the past two hours. Guest