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| Michael Marshall |
Man-made polymer plastic molecules - or the world's largest molecule (the one large molecule of cell wall that wraps around and protects a bacteria's interior) - are big but not necessarily complex.
Modernity was naif in most ways, particularly when it came to the paradoxes of lifeforms.
It had a simplistic hierarchy of size and complexity - and could never stop from conflating the two.
Ever bigger and bigger hydro dams and cannons and skyscrapers and battleships and on and on could always be trusted to get Modernist Man's juices flowing.
But inside a bacteria's tiny genome are packed a surprisingly large number of highly varied genes.
They don't program , for example, for 40 pounds of relatively undifferentiated muscle like you might see on the average male human.
Yes, its big, its butch, its bulky but frankly its like knitting : knot one purl one, knit one ,purl two - for billions of iterations.
By contrast each of a bacteria's hundreds of gene complexes can hide a completely different form of metabolism - those guys can eat a surprisingly wide variety of food stocks - thing that frankly we don't see as food.
That is why they have hung on on Earth for four billion years through extreme heat and cold, or poison gases and resource famines ; surviving millions of years of droughts and ice ages in deep sleep only to emerge alive and ready to rock and roll.
But us ?
Yes we're big.
Big like dinosaurs and all the other extinct mega fauna - and just about as vulnerable to even minor changes in our feeding regimes.
In our post-modern AGE OF COMMENSALITY we are beginning to accept that Life's tiniest beings have much hidden complexity under the hood that we are only just beginning to learn about.
Bring back the Dr Martin Henry Dawson from 1927 into the research labs of today and he'd hit the ground running - nothing we have uncovered in 85 years since would really throw him for a loop.
Been there, done that.....
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