Top 50 Ed Yong Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions: frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.”

— Ed Yong

2. “All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.”

— Ed Yong

3. “As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, “Animals might be evolution’s icing, but bacteria are really the cake.”

— Ed Yong

4. “Every one of us is a zoo in our own right – a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.”

— Ed Yong

5. “There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.”

— Ed Yong

6. “Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19.”

— Ed Yong

7. “The team also worked out how the microbes were affecting the brain. Their main suspect was the vagus nerve. It’s a long branching nerve that carries signals between the brain and visceral organs like the gut-a physical embodiment of the gut-brain axis. The team severed it, and found that the mind-altering JB-1 lost all its influence.”

— Ed Yong

8. “Much of modern medicine is built upon the foundations that antibiotics provide, and those foundations are now crumbling.”

— Ed Yong

9. “We now know that gut microbes are part of this axis, in both directions. Since the 1970s, a trickle of studies have shown that any kind of stress – starvation, sleeplessness, being separated from one’s mother, the sudden arrival of an aggressive individual, uncomfortable temperatures, overcrowding, even loud noises – can change a mouse’s gut microbiome. The opposite is also true: the microbiome can affect a host’s behaviour, including its social attitudes and its ability to deal with stress.40.”

— Ed Yong

10. “We can compare the gut of a person with inflammatory bowel disease to a dying coral reef or a fallow field: a battered ecosystem where the balance of organisms has gone awry.”

— Ed Yong

11. “When a langur or human gets sick, its problems are akin to a lake that’s smothered by algae or a meadow that’s overrun with weeds – ecosystems gone awry.”

— Ed Yong

12. “As we have seen, bacteria have ways of hacking into the nervous system.”

— Ed Yong

13. “The brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii is another puppetmaster. It can only sexually reproduce in a cat; if it gets into a rat, it suppresses the rodent’s natural fear of cat odours and replaces it with something more like sexual attraction. The rodent scurries towards nearby cats, with fatal results, and T. gondii gets to complete its life cycle.50 The.”

— Ed Yong

14. “It’s hard stuff, this science business, but someone’s got to do it. For.”

— Ed Yong

15. “Each animal is an ecosystem with legs,” says John Rawls.”

— Ed Yong

16. “The citrus mealybug is a living matryoshka doll. It has bacteria living inside its cells, and those bacteria have more bacteria living inside them. Bugs within bugs within bugs.”

— Ed Yong

17. “Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.”

— Ed Yong

18. “The mere presence of a guitar in someone’s bedroom doesn’t make them Slash.”

— Ed Yong

19. “So females, by mating with the right partners, can suddenly become immune to wasp attacks, which makes Hamiltonella that rarest of things: a desirable venereal infection.28.”

— Ed Yong

20. “So, here’s the irony: toilets that are cleaned too often are more likely to be covered in faecal bacteria. Jessica.”

— Ed Yong

21. “And the most extreme examples of this mutually assured success can be found in the deep oceans, where some microbes supplement their hosts to such a degree that the animals can eat the most impoverished diets of all – nothing. In.”

— Ed Yong

22. “It allows the team to culture the many gut bacteria that are extremely intolerant of the gas. “If you write the word oxygen on a piece of paper and show it to these bugs, they’ll die,” jokes Gordon.”

— Ed Yong

23. “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

— Ed Yong

24. “Rebellious, and contemptuous of dogma, she was the consummate scientific iconoclast. “I don’t consider my ideas controversial,” she once said. “I consider them right.”

— Ed Yong

25. “Our darkest fiction is full of Orwellian dystopias, shadowy cabals, and mind-controlling supervillains. But it turns out that the brainless, microscopic, single-celled organisms that live inside us have been pulling on our strings all along. On.”

— Ed Yong

26. “Jumping spiders remind us that we share a visual reality with other sighted creatures, but we experience it in utterly different ways. “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets,” Jakob tells me. “We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.”

— Ed Yong

27. “The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences – things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany. They connect animals to their surroundings. And they connect animals to each other via expressions, displays, gestures, calls, and currents.”

— Ed Yong

28. “The quote is often taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural. I see it rather as a call to better understand the natural. Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations.”

— Ed Yong

29. “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of realities fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.”

— Ed Yong

30. “To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane.”

— Ed Yong

31. “What may be featureless to us, a waste of undifferentiated ocean, is for them rich with distinction and variety, a fissured and wrinkled landscape, dense in patches, thin in others, a rolling olfactory prairie of the desired and the desirable, mottled and unreliable, speckled with life, streaky with pleasures and dangers, marbled and flecked, its riches often hidden and always mobile, but filled with places that are pregnant with life and possibility.”

— Ed Yong

32. “The evolutionary benefit of nociception is abundantly clear. It’s an alarm system that allows animals to detect things that might harm or kill them, and take steps to protect themselves. But the origin of pain, on top of that, is less obvious. What is the adaptive value of suffering?”

— Ed Yong

33. “Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations.”

— Ed Yong

34. “On this journey through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.”

— Ed Yong

35. “It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”

— Ed Yong

36. “And thanks to the unfortunate persistence of dualism – the outdated belief that the mind and body are separate – people often equate subjective with woolly, and psychological with imagined.”

— Ed Yong

37. “We only have a rough sense of the sense that senses roughness.”

— Ed Yong

38. “The filiform hairs of crickets and the trichobothria of spiders are almost inconceivably sensitive. They can be deflected by a fraction of the energy in a single photon – the smallest possible quantity of visible light. These hairs are a hundred times more sensitive than any visual receptor that exists, or could possibly exist.”

— Ed Yong

39. “By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking.”

— Ed Yong

40. “Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around the world.”

— Ed Yong

41. “We need to spend some time in the weeds to appreciate the flowers.”

— Ed Yong

42. “A scientist’s data are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of our own Umwelt corral our ability to understand the Umwelten of others.”

— Ed Yong

43. “It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

— Ed Yong

44. “Every person aerosolises around 37 million bacteria per hour. This means that our microbiome isn’t confined to our bodies. It perpetually reaches out into our environment.”

— Ed Yong

45. “For creatures like these that are constantly immersed in liquid, the distinction between taste and smell can be so confusing that one neuroscientist just told me, “I avoid thinking about it.”

— Ed Yong

46. “To microbes, every host is effectively an island – a world surrounded by void.”

— Ed Yong

47. “Even our ability to taste bitter, which warns us of hundreds of potentially toxic compounds, isn’t built to distinguish between them. There’s only one sensation of bitter because you don’t need to know which bitter thing you’re tasting – you just need to know to stop tasting it.”

— Ed Yong

48. “But personal responsibility cannot compensate for societal irresponsibility. To truly make a dent in sensory pollution, bigger steps are needed.”

— Ed Yong

49. “A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these things either, but we are the only animal that can try.”

— Ed Yong

50. “We are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be.”

— Ed Yong