In considering the advantages of size, we should rule out objects composed of non-living matter. A rock does not benefit from being bigger, nor suffer any disadvantage by being smaller than its neighbours. A rock just is. Living matter, on the other hand, has a tendency to grow. Past its peak, living matter shrivels and eventually resolves itself back to its component non-living particles. Where life is concerned, size matters.
Life begins with a single cell. Within a biome supporting mono-cellular organisms, larger cells hunt and consume smaller cells. Larger cells have a comparative advantage over smaller ones in terms of relative speed, strength, and overpower capability — a big ‘mouth’ fits in more bits of food, turning them into useful energy faster than they can protest. Yes, a small ‘mouth’ could nibble on a larger organism, but usually more successfully if the latter were dead rather than alive.
Biology creates a competitive environment with a simple rule: eat or be eaten. Consequently, the side-effect is that individuals that are clearly disadvantaged by their physically larger competitors develop ‘cooperation’. Banding together to become a multi-cellular organism gives the collective more advantages, more flexibility, more adaptability than their previously larger cell mates. Biological things grow. Bigger is better.
As biological creatures, human beings are subject to the same principles. Individually, we are easy prey to predators in the wild. To protect ourselves, we band together into communities. With our different talents and abilities, we work together to gather resources to feed ourselves. Our surpluses of resources have grown our initial family groups into villages, towns and today, the mega-cities that house the majority of our population. So a relatively small species like ours has benefited greatly from becoming big — big enough to almost take over the entire land surface of the planet. We can proudly declare ourselves the planet’s “Apex Predator” because none of our closest competitors can speak English.
However, there is a type of cellular growth that will eventually become biologically disastrous. We call it “cancer”. Cancer can be described as a rapidly unstoppable growth of corrupted cells within an organism that hinders rather than helps the organism it is growing in. Untreated, cancer grows to the point where it disrupts the normal, healthy function of the other cellular systems. As one by one they shut down, the entire organism dies.
Given how human society has grown to almost engulf the planet with our excess waste and effluent; the disruption of the normal, healthy ecosystems that existed long before we started terraforming our planet; and the mass extinctions of whole species of flora and fauna that once gave this planet its enviable biodiversity; my darker thoughts suggest that our planet is a cancer patient. One of its cellular systems has gone rogue, and is now grown so large that it’s endangering the fragile biosphere that once allowed it to flourish.
Bigger is not always better. Time to do some pruning. Me, I’ve voluntarily decided to not have kids. Going by the latest marriage statistics, many of my fellow human beings appear to be joining me in this effort to reduce the growth rate of people, one cell at a time. Hopefully, it’s not too late.
(535 words)
This essay was a response to a REQUEST. The original source of the question is, for the moment, unknown.
Click here to access to my annotated Google Doc for notes on my thought process in the composition of this essay.