What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pre… - Jonathan Weiner

“Our only real competition for domination of the planet remains the viruses,” the microbiologist Joshua Lederberg once said. “The survival of humanity,” he added, “is not preordained.”

One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer.

With the discovery of the clock gene, the sense of time, mysterious for so many centuries, was no longer a mystery that could be observed only from the outside. Now it could be explored as a mechanism from the inside. The discovery implied that behavior itself could now be charted and mapped as precisely as any other aspect of inheritance. Qualities that people had always thought of as somehow floating above the body, apart from the body, as if they belonged to the realm of the spirit and not of the flesh, as if they were supernatural, might be mapped right alongside qualities as mundane as eye pigment.