What You'll Learn:
Humanity’s most fearsome adversary is not the crocodile, the shark, or the tiger. It’s not even fellow humans. It’s the mosquito, an organism that has complicated and shaped human history.
Key Insights:
- No animal has shaped human history like the mosquito.
- Mosquitoes drove the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
- John Smith was a fraud and Jamestown was no paradise.
- Without the aid of mosquitoes, it’s improbable that the rebellious Americans would have beaten back the British.
- A series of medical discoveries in the late 1800s and early 1900s helped humans land a major blow against their primeval foe.
- DDT helped us win a battle against mosquito-borne illnesses, but the war is far from over.
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