Zoobiquity Read Online Free Page A

trails through the shared terrain of human and animal biology include Sean B. Carroll (
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
), Jared Diamond (
The Third Chimpanzee
), Steven Pinker (
The Blank Slate
), Frans de Waal (
Our Inner Ape
), Robert Sapolsky (
A Primate’s Memoir
), and Jerry Coyne (
Why Evolution Is True
), to name just a few.
    Interest in the mental life of animals, dismissed for many years as too speculative and an exercise in anthropomorphizing, has gained greater acceptance, too. Books by Temple Grandin (
Animals Make Us Human
and
Animals in Translation
), Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (
When Elephants Weep
), Marc Bekoff (
The Emotional Lives of Animals
), and Alexandra Horowitz (
Inside of a Dog
) have demonstrated animal cognition and behavior that resemble what we might call foresight, regret, shame, guilt, revenge, and love.
    Yet, while inspiring and illuminating, their books left me wanting a concrete way I could use their insights to improve my work as a physician. I wanted to break down the wall between physicians, veterinarians, and evolutionary biologists because together we are uniquely situated to explore the animal-human overlap where it matters most urgently—in the effort to heal our patients.
    What had captivated me as a physician, what launched me on a journey that reshaped my entire approach to medicine, was a simple idea: to distill these decades of evolutionary research together with the collective wisdom of animal caregivers into a form both my patients and I could use within the four walls of my examining room.
    Kathryn and I had found, practically without exception, an animal correlate to every human disease we could think of—from “Jurassic cancer”to “diseases of civilization.” What we lacked was a name for this new fusion of veterinary, human, and evolutionary medicine.
    Finding nothing in the literature, we decided to come up with our own: “zoobiquity.” From the Greek for “animal,”
zo
, and the Latin for “everywhere,”
ubique
, “zoobiquity” joins two cultures (Greek and Latin), just as we are joining the “cultures” of human and animal medicine.
    Zoobiquity looks to animals, and the doctors who care for them, for answers to humankind’s pressing concerns. It peers back into our deep past—pausing but not stopping at great apes or even primates on the evolutionary timeline. It opens our minds to the common illnesses and shared vulnerabilities of the mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, and even the bacteria with whom we evolved and share Earth.
    Engineers already seek inspiration from the natural world, a field called biomimetics. Wings and fins inspire designers to create vehicles that float and fly more efficiently.Cockroaches helped solve the pressing problem of how to keep a robot stable as it climbs over uneven terrain, after researchers copied the insect’s double-tripod legs and produced a machine that rarely tips over and can right itself when it does. Termites, mosquitoes, toucans, glowworms, and moths are just a few of the animals with superpower-like adaptations that scientists are trying to bring to a human market.
    Now it’s medicine’s turn. I was in the right place at the right time to put takotsubo together with capture myopathy. (You’ll find more on this finding in Chapter 6 , “Scared to Death.”) Zoobiquity encourages similar interdisciplinary experiences for other physicians. And this field-merging approach could have other important benefits. If studies funded by the National Institutes of Health expanded the boundaries of their inquiry by adding the simple question “Do animals get ______?” the benefits of scientific investigation could be vastly amplified.
    A comparative approach could extend far beyond the walls of a human or veterinary hospital. It could help aspiring businessmen or middle school girls navigate complex hierarchies—by exposing similar challenges within a school of salmon or a herd of bighorn sheep. It points out