For most of human history, people went about their daily lives with a worm or two (or fifty) in their guts. Only in the past century, with pharmaceuticals and sanitation practices, have we made significant strides towards deworming the whole of humanity. And that's typically been thought of as a good thing, because having too many worms in your body can–quite literally–suck the life out of you. But is it possible to have… too few worms?
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We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is reinventing us.
Aldous Huxley — Ends and Means
The true paradox of the machine is that it was created to serve man, yet it has enslaved him to its rhythms and demands; we have made ourselves the appendages of our own inventions.
Lewis Mumford — Technics and Civilization
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would have remained unchanged since the earliest days; no evolution, no mankind, nothing.
Lewis Thomas — The Medusa and the Snail