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Title: Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0-7432-0011-X Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 11 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (30 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating scientific odyssey & creepy too!
Comment: I'm going to keep this one short and sweet. Buy this book!! PARASITE REX is a riveting look into the world of parasitology. It covers literally everything a layperson could need to know about the little critters that ride along with us through life.
The author, Carl Zimmer, starts with a history of the oft misunderstood creatures (which range from viruses to animalian life and through many life stage forms). He then moves on to explaining life cycles of parasites and how they affect their environment (sometimes by controlling their hosts right down to their sex lives); he uses specific examples to do so with incredible and often gross detail. But the "gross factor" of this book is definintely part of the reason for reading it! This book is just plain fun. Zimmer also posits some theories on how to use parasites to our advantage (among other things) which sound outlandish or impractical, but are interesting and thought provoking nonetheless. Pictures and a glossary of terms are included to add to your education in parasitology.
This is easily one of the best science books of the last year. It is thorough without being difficult to read or too academic for the layperson. As well as being an engrossing read, it also is fun, gross and creepy -- just the thing to keep you up at night and make you start to pay more attention to your world. Read this book!
Rating: 5
Summary: Not for the faint of heart or nervous of temperament...
Comment: Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex, writes with all the authority of a practicing parasitologist, despite the fact that he is actually a science journalist. In addition, and invaluably, his account is heavily informed by his deep understanding of the processes and mechanisms of natural selection. Evaluating Parasite Rex purely as a knowledge-delivery device, it is simply not subject to criticism.
But the book is so much more than that. Zimmer is a very Stephen King of pop science, by which I do not mean to damn him with faint praise; Parasite Rex kept this reader on the edge of his seat, in an agony of suspense and terror, for the weekend it took to devour it from cover to cover. Zimmer knows what he is doing.
The first sections of the book relate a series of parasite life histories, examples of the complex, delicately-balanced, highly-specialized strategies modern parasitic organisms have evolved. The organizing principle behind these stories is clear, and it isn't based on the taxonomies, strategies, or environments of either parasites or hosts -- Zimmer has selected these particular accounts, and the order in which he relates them, in order to bring the reader efficiently to a crescendo of visceral horror.
Most people tend to experience a strong reaction of disgust and aversion when presented with information about parasites; apparently we cannot help but empathize with an infested host, and to sympathize accordingly. Zimmer lays the examples on so thick, each more horrifying than the last, that reading his book becomes a sort of intellectual equivalent of hunkering down in a war zone.
My own particular favorite is the parasite Sacculina carcini, which makes its home inside a crab. It begins by sterilizing its host if it is female, and if the host is male, both sterilizing it and forcing it to produce hormones that render it behaviorally female. It then begins to infiltrate and replace the crab's body, including much of its brain. The crab continues seeking food, which it feeds directly to its parasite. When Sacculina reproduces, it places its offspring in a pouch where the crab's offspring would go (if the host is male, the parasite forms a pouch in the appropriate location). The crab acts to protect the parasite's offspring just as it would its own -- and even carefully disperses them when it is time to do so, just as it would carriers of its own genetic heritage. This is the stuff of science fiction, a parasite that takes over everything and leaves only its host's outer shell intact.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps still more horrifying to learn that many parasites of vertebrate hosts have evolved to produce (or cause their hosts to produce) neurotransmitters that tend to create behavior patterns that serve the parasite's interests far more than the host's. For example, if a parasite lives in a fish in one stage of its life cycle, but wants to be in a bird for the next, it makes its piscine host less afraid of shadows on the water, and more interested in feeding near the surface. Indeed, psychologists have found distinct behavior patterns -- different in males and females -- associated with being a human host to cysts of the parasite Toxoplasma. Toxoplasma wants its host to be eaten by a predator, so it makes males tend to be loners who resent authority, and makes females tend to be outgoing and overly-trusting. By the way, if, like me, you grew up with cats, you almost certainly host Toxoplasma yourself.
Having shattered his audience with such ghastly memes as these, Zimmer next begins to put some of the pieces back together. He mitigates the naked horror of the first chapters with an exploration of the role parasites and parasitism have played in the evolution of multi-cellular organisms. To a degree he overstates his case; if it is true that parasites are a third and in many ways causal factor in the well-known phenomenon whereby wolves cull the weak out of the caribou herd, it is not accurate to claim that the parasites are "the" drivers of evolution. It is, however, accurate to say that parasites co-evolved with both caribou and wolf, and that the role parasites generally have played in all natural selection has been consistently and systematically over-looked and under-considered in the evolution literature.
There is much of interest in the evolution section which I will not discuss here; rather I will confine myself to the final punchline: since medical science has begun successfully eradicating many kinds of parasites from the post-industrial human experience, new disorders have begun to emerge to replace the "missing" organisms.
Many parasites have the ability to reduce their hosts' immune responses. If the presence of such parasites was, on average, an evolutionary constant, then we can expect humans to have evolved immune systems that operate optimally only when the chemicals these parasites produce are present. Remove the parasites and the human immune system becomes too strong for its own good, and begins treating harmless material as pathogenic (consider the epidemic of allergies in post-industrial countries versus the nonexistence of allergies in the third world) or begins attacking its own body (i.e., newly-developed bowel ailments such as Crohn's disease or irritable bowel syndrome).
The reader is obliged in the end to adjust to life with the relatively abstract and alloyed horror induced by the knowledge that we in principle should not seek to eliminate parasites from the human experience. We might engineer them, subvert them to serve our interests just as they have done to us for millennia, but we ought not to eliminate them. Every gardener knows that it is clearing an area of its naturally-balanced flora that creates an opportunity for hyper-infestation of weed species; let's hope medical science doesn't continue forcing us to learn the same lesson with our own bodies.
Rating: 5
Summary: Zimmer's book is fascinating
Comment: Flukes that can cleverly induce their snail and piscine hosts right into a hungry bird's beak; wasps that lay their eggs inside caterpillars and spiders, forcing these unfortunate hosts to nurture the wasp larvae after they hatch; and yes, tiny parasites that can manipulate and outwit human immune and nervous systems -- all to continue the parasite's life cycle ... at our expense.
Zimmer intensified my interest in parasitology when I read his Discover magazine article "Do Parasites Rule the World?" This led me to his "Parasite Rex" which more comprehensively explores the dominating role that parasites play in global ecosystems.
Organisms that biologists had long regarded as nothing more than a freeloading nuisance have since been found to control not only their hosts' behavior but to shape the evolution of organisms as complex as human beings. Zimmer provides a generous supply of well-researched examples and anecdotes on the various types of parasites and their behavior as well as the different and ingenious ways parasites can overcome their hosts' defenses.
And once this reality threshold has been established, Zimmer examines others' treatment of parasites in the works of science fiction, some eerily lifelike, others laughable, but each in its own right fascinatingly familiar for those courageous enough to have taken interest in the biology of these highly underrated, often-scorned creatures.
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Title: Fearsome Fauna: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You by Roger M. Knutson ISBN: 0716733862 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: At the Water's Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0684856239 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 08 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature by William Agosta ISBN: 0691092737 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Parasite Menace by Skye Weintraub ISBN: 1885670885 Publisher: Woodland Publishing Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Evolution : The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0060958502 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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