There is a lot to be said for being small. Whether we are talking about animals, institutions or nations, the most useful, pleasant, efficient and beautiful examples generally are smaller rather than larger.
Usually, the smaller the animal, the less it minds being around humans. When I look into my garden or into the fields nearby, the wild animals I see, with few exceptions, are small.
Crawling and flying insects seem to be unaware of human presence. Small and intermediate-sized birds - robins, tits, blackbirds, thrushes, swallows, pigeons etc - make their own of the garden. As regards fourlegged wild mammals, I often see a rabbit, occasionally a hare, but rarely a fox.
Small animals are much more useful than larger ones for providing passive companionship to humans.
I lived for a few years in mid-western America where, when night falls, the insects strike up quite a chorus of sound. I often sat on the porch in the warm night summer air seeing how many individual sounds I could pick out of the background chorus. My acuity was greatly assisted by a couple of cans of beer.
Now when I sit in my garden I notice that the sweetest songs are sung by the smallest birds. Larger birds, like the pigeon or the crow, produce monotonous or raucous sounds.
Mammals generally don't produce harmonious sounds, being mainly limited to grunting or barking.
Smaller animals take more care in building nests and tending for their young than larger animals. The smaller an object the greater its surface to volume ratio, therefore, smaller animals lose more heat through their relatively large surface areas.
This at least partially explains why they take greater care in building well-designed cosy nests than do larger animals. Life began on earth as a very small organism - similar in many ways to the modern bacterium. Most life on earth remains of small and intermediate size.
However, giant forms of life have always existed, most commonly among the vertebrates.
Vertebrates have internal skeletons and a circulation system which can support much larger amounts of flesh than can, for example, the external skeletons and relatively inefficient circulatory system of insects. In the past, each main division of the vertebrates has produced giants.
The most famous giants were the reptile dinosaurs. They included the 80-tonne 90 ftlong vegetarian Brachiosaurus and the well-known Tyrannosaurus Rex, with its 6 in teeth.
It was 19 ft tall on its hind legs, 40 ft long, and it was the most powerful predator to walk the earth.
After the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago, the mammals developed and in turn produced giants of their own. Today, for example, we have the elephant, the giraffe, the rhinoceros and the blue whale.
Among fish, 20 ft mantas and sharks swim in our oceans.
Why does evolution produce giants? One explanation is found in the predator-prey relationship. A genetic mutation in some individuals of a prey-species that makes them larger will also confer a degree of protection against natural predators.
These larger individuals survive and procreate better, gradually making the entire preyspecies bigger. The predator species is now at a disadvantage and mutations producing larger body size occurring among individuals there confer an advantage, allowing them to survive and reproduce better than their fellows.
This causes the body size of the general predator species to become larger.
Natural selection therefore drives body size upwards in this see-saw manner with prey size continually increasing to stay ahead of predator size. The geological record shows that the largest terrestrial predators co-existed with the largest herbivores upon whom they preyed.
Gigantism is, overall, an unproductive product of evolution.
Many small species of life, for example insects which pollinate, birds which disseminate seeds etc pay the environment back generously for the food that they take.
In the absence of pollination crop-agriculture would be crippled. On the other hand, gigantic animals eat huge quantities of food that they do nothing to produce.
Gigantic animals also find it difficult to adapt to a changing environment and to evolve into altered forms that would allow them to continue their lines through future generations.
In the world of technology, the characteristic technologies which mark our age are the electronics and computer industries. This sector pursues miniaturisation with a vengeance.
When I began work at University College Cork in the mid-1970s, the college had only one computer - a mainframe machine which filled a large room, with ancillary pieces housed in other rooms, and attended by a considerable staff. I am writing this article on my personal lap-top computer, more powerful than that 1970s mainframe computer.
Human institutions can suffer from terrible problems if they grow to gigantic proportions. There is much pressure today to centralise and to have fewer but larger facilities.
Such developments are defended by arguments about economy of scale, critical mass etc.
These arguments make sense insofar as they go, but they are often made without taking other factors into account, such as how to maintain the human intimacy upon which much productivity depends.
Consequently, you often end up with a large institution, equipped with a much-improved hardware infrastructure compared to the several smaller institutions it replaced, but with a fouled-up software of human interactions producing an overall situation where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Huge states also have problems. They can be difficult to organise and control internally, and they often make powerful and aggressive neighbours.
There is much to be said for modesty as regards size. The idea that bigger is better is a vulgar notion which is all too popular. It has become a cornerstone of economic thinking.
Why do we perpetually have to enlarge the economy in order just to stand still? The economists should learn some biology.
William Reville is a senior lec- turer in biochemistry and direc- tor of microscopy at UCC