Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer (Author). IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites management the minds of their hosts, sending them to their destruction.
IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites are masters of chemical warfare and camouflage, able to cloak themselves with their hosts’ own molecules.
IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites steer the course of evolution, the place nearly all of species are parasites.
WELCOME TO EARTH.
For hundreds of years, parasites have lived in nightmares, horror tales, and within the darkest shadows of science. But these creatures are among the many world’s most successful and complex organisms. In “Parasite Rex,” Carl Zimmer deftly balances the scientific and the disgusting as he takes readers on an incredible voyage. Touring from the steamy jungles of Costa Rica to the fetid parasite haven of southern Sudan, Zimmer graphically brings to life how parasites can change DNA, rewire the brain, make males extra distrustful and women more outgoing, and turn hosts into the residing dead.
This thorough, gracefully written an ebook brings parasites out into the open and uncovers what they can train us about the most basic survival techniques in the universe.
This is a type of uncommon books that may completely alter how you take a look at the world. Read it and you begin seeing parasites in each pores and skin blemish you have. To see a cat catch a mouse and all you can do is consider all the parasites its about the ingest. You discover yourself wanting to go to the parasite museum in Maryland to see all the horrible creatures you’ve got been reading about. You start thinking that Zimmer’s proper and that parasites have driven the evolution of the world. You begin wondering if Stephen King has learned it and if so what novel he’s writing. You start questioning if there’s thousands of little cysts in your mind and that your life objective of happening safari in Africa might have revaluated. You imagine what it’s like to extract a guinea worm from your leg. Your query whether or not you will ever eat a crab again.
You wonder if the reason you’ve been so hungry of late is as a result of there is a sixty foot long tapeworm inside your intestines. It’s a beautiful ebook and a vital one. Zimmer found something obvious that is being overlooked in biology and if he is right will change the way in which we view life. Survival of the individual will be changed to the survival of the creature dwelling contained in the individual. For instance, there’s a parasite that gets inside a snail, takes it over, forces it climbs a blade of grass and anticipate a grazing cow to wander by and eat it. The cow is where the parasite wants to end up.
The snail is just a vessel to reach the cow. The young of the parasite end up in cow pies which the snail eats and the cycle begins again. The complex world of flukes and tapeworms, of enslaved crabs and suicidal snails, of sleeping illness and malaria, is sort of an automobile wreck: you need to turn away however you may, you’re compelled to look petrified of what you might see. As you explore the book you be taught that these creatures are way more than revolting. I can not say you may ever view them with sympathy, you’ll be able to view them with respect — and hopefully at a secure distance.
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures
Carl Zimmer (Author)
298 pages
The Free Press; 1 edition (September 21, 2000)
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