Disease Quotes

“Cancer if often referred to as a -disease of modernity-, suggesting that recent lifestyle and environmental factors are mostly responsible for this disease burden. However, comparative data on cancer prevalence suggests that the disease is evolutionarily ancient and has been a health issue for almost all multicellular animals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Human societies can reshape many environmental components at rapid rates, including (but not limited to) migration into new ecologies/landscapes with novel pathogens and UV exposure, introduction to novel foods, inhaling carcinogens through smoking, pollution from industrialisation, increase in energetic consumption and demographic transitions that impact fertility rates.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer is a threat to almost all multicellular species across the tree of life, and neoplastic formation has been a persistent selective pressure since the dawn of multicellularity.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The term -stress- is almost always used to refer to a negative stimulus but increases in cortisol also occur during positive and beneficial experiences, such as mating and exercise. Cortisol serves other functions across the soma, including in energy metabolism. Therefore, accurately interpreting changes in cortisol levels requiere knowledge of context, perception and activity levels.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Once you have a body filled with nutritional deficiencies, you may be on a ticking time bomb to disease.”
― Steven Magee, Pandemic Supplements

“The single thing most people can do to most improve their health is to cut the fat content of their diets.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“During most all of human evolution, it was adaptive to conserve energy by being lazy as circumstances permitted. Energy was a vitally needed resourse and could not be wasted. Today this take-it-easy adaptation may lead us to watch tennis on television when we would be better off playing it. This can only aggravate the effects of excess nutrition. The average office worker would be much more healthy if he or she spent the day digging clams or harvesting fruit in scattered tall trees.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Except for professional athletes, dancers, cowboys, and a few other groups, most people in modern industrial societies have abnormally low energy expenditures. Workers sitting in swivel chairs or in driver's seats of cars or even pushing vacuum cleaners or electrically powered lawn mowers are being sedentary, and their leisure hours may be even more so.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Our dietary problems arise from a mismatch between the tastes evolved for Stone Age conditions and their likely effects today. Fat, sugar, and salt were in short supply through nearly all of our evolutionary history. Almost everyone, most of the time, would have been better off with more of these substances, and it was consistenly adaptive to want more and try to get it. Today most of us can afford to eat more fat, sugar, and salt than is biologically adaptive, more than would ever have been available to our ancestors of a few thousands years ago.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The current danger for most of us is not the deprivation suffered bu our ancestors but an excess of nutrition.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The current danger for most of us is not the deprivation suffered by our ancestors but an excess of nutrition.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Emotional capacities are shaped by situations that occurred repeatedly in the course of evolution and that were important to fitness. Attacks by predators, threats of exclusion from the group, and opportunities for mating were frequent and important enough to have shaped special patterns of preparedness, such as panic, social fear, and sexual arousal. Situations that are best avoided shape aversive emotions, while situations that involve opportunity shape positive emotions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Paradoxically, it now is much easier to treat many mental disorders than it is to understand them.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Just as there are several components of the immune system, each of which protects us against particular kinds of invasions, there are subtypes of emotion that protect us against a variety of particular kinds of threats.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Depression may seem completely useless. Even apart from the risk of suicide, sitting all day morosely staring at the wall can't get you very far. A person with severe depression typically loses interest in everything -work, friends, food, even sex. It is as if the capacities for pleasure and initiative have been turned off. Some people cry spontaneously, but others are beyond tears. Some wake every morning at 4 A.M. and can't get back to sleep; others sleep for twelve or fourteen hours per day. Some have delusions that they are impoverished, stupid, ugly, or dying of cancer. Almost all have low self-esteem. It seems preposterous even to consider that there should be anything adaptive associated with such symptoms. And yet depression is so frequent, and so closely related to ordinary sadness, that we must begin by asking if depression arises from a basic abnormality or if it is a dysregulation of a normal capacity.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Therapists have long known that may depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Therapists have long known that many depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“People are not controlled by some internal calculator that crudely motivates them to maximize their reproductive success. Instead, people form deep, lifelong emotional attachments and experience loves and hates that shape their lives. They have religious beliefs that guide their behavior, and they have idiosyncratic goals and ambitions. They have networks of friends and relatives.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Afraid you won’t be able to keep up,” needled Volant, interrupting. “I thought you were The Fastest Flier in the Sky?!”

“Really,” said Gabby. “That’s how you’re going to play this?”

“Yep, slowpoke, that’s how I’m going to play it.”

And without another word, Volant the eagle launched into the air, pointed south, with not so much as a glance back.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“Thank goodness,” said Gabby after all the bats had landed. Then the seagull crept to the edge of the perch where he and Volant rested, and leaned far out and over, ducking and twisting his head to peer below the branches and almost tumbling into space. Straightening back up, Gabby exclaimed, “Talk about a head rush—the bats are all perched upside down!”
― Scott Bischke

“Suicide can help pass on an individual's genes to the next generation in a situation where that individual is a burden to their close relatives and their own reproductive potential is weak. By taking their life, an individual may contribute to the reproductive success of their close relatives and thus to the proliferation of their own genes. In such a case, that individual's close relatives would have one mouth less to feed and no sick individual to look after. Indeed, several studies have shown that suicidal thoughts and suicides are more common in those who have poor chances of reproduction and who feel they are merely a burden to their loved ones.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Major depressive disorder is a disease caused by features of the contemporary Western lifestyle: social isolation, limited physical activity, chronic stress and unhealthy food.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Reluctantly the four people backed away from the fence, the young man shouting to the young woman and cupping his hand to his ear as if holding a phone. The young woman shook her head yes, then turned to walk back up the coast, holding the small girl’s hand, the uniformed man close behind.

When the young woman looked back over her shoulder one last time, the small girl broke away, sprinting out onto the beach. The young woman raced out and caught the small girl, but not before she had scattered a flock of seagulls into the sky.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“Wow, so much to learn!" said Volant the eagle. "Fish-eating bats, pale bats, bats with little ears, bats with long noses, bats with noses that look like leaves… Next thing you know, you’re going to tell me there are bats that drink blood like vampires!”

“There are those, indeed, as well,” said Sully the Leaf-nosed bat.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“Some of the guard bats hung from the tall cardón cactus that partially blocked the entrance to the cave; some guard bats hung along the edge of the cave entrance. The presence of these burly guards, along with the big cardón cactus, created a formidable boundary, a wall of sorts that could be used for controlling entry to the cave.

And for the Pallid bats controlling who could enter the cave was precisely the goal.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“The people said there might be disease in the cave," said Gabby the seagull. "They seemed really worried. They kept talking about how people can give the bats something called COVID and how bad that would be because even if the bats don’t get sick they can pass it on to other animals or right back to people later. And also they talked about a fungus and white noses and feeble bats and bats flying off-kilter and about how bat colonies around the world have been wiped out.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“Once she’d lifted the bat out of the cage, the younger woman turned slowly, lifted her hands high, then said, “Time to go home, little one” as she opened her hands.

The bat hesitated for a moment, as if unclear it was free to go, then it fluttered away. The people watched by headlamp as the bat circled them twice, before disappearing into the sky.

All the while, the older man with the camera had been positioning himself to record the moment. His photo caught the young scientist silhouetted on one side of the image, the dark outline of the island on the other side, just as the bat took flight into the orange sunrise glowing across the water.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“As they moved to push off the boat, a loud squawk sounded near at hand. The people pulled up short in time see the outline of a seagull fly past, the bird chattering wildly. Before anyone could speak, another bird took flight from the palapa. This bird, far larger than the first, passed overhead as a dark apparition. The big bird made no sound, save the gentle whoosh from its massive wings.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions

“I’ve always wanted to go to Australia," said Volant the eagle. "Just think of it: kangaroos and koala bears, wallabies and wombats!”

“Cool enough,” returned Gabby the seagull. “But I’ve always wanted to see a platypus. Sort of a beaver with a duckbill?! How can that possibly be?”

“Nothing surprises me much anymore,” said Volant. “Seems like almost anything is possible.”
― Scott Bischke, Bat Cave: A Fable of Epidemic Proportions