The History of Cut UpsĪ precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.Download the CutUp Machine WordPress Plugin! The Cut Up TechniqueĬut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.Įverything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia.
We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We live at high densities in many cities. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. “We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond.
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