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    Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
    Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
    Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
    Ebook160 pages2 hours

    Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales

    By John Tyler Bonner

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    About this ebook

    Why size plays such a big role in the living world

    John Tyler Bonner, one of our most distinguished and creative biologists, here offers a completely new perspective on the role of size in biology. In his hallmark friendly style, he explores the universal impact of being the right size. By examining stories ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Gulliver's Travels, he shows that humans have always been fascinated by things big and small. Why then does size always reside on the fringes of science and never on the center stage? Why do biologists and others ponder size only when studying something else--running speed, life span, or metabolism?

    Why Size Matters, a pioneering book of big ideas in a compact size, gives size its due by presenting a profound yet lucid overview of what we know about its role in the living world. Bonner argues that size really does matter--that it is the supreme and universal determinant of what any organism can be and do. For example, because tiny creatures are subject primarily to forces of cohesion and larger beasts to gravity, a fly can easily walk up a wall, something we humans cannot even begin to imagine doing.

    Bonner introduces us to size through the giants and dwarfs of human, animal, and plant history and then explores questions including the physics of size as it affects biology, the evolution of size over geological time, and the role of size in the function and longevity of living things.

    As this elegantly written book shows, size affects life in its every aspect. It is a universal frame from which nothing escapes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 5, 2011
    ISBN9781400837557
    Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
    Author

    John Tyler Bonner

    John Tyler Bonner is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. His books include The Social Amoebae: The Biology of Cellular Slime Molds and Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales (both Princeton).

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    • 5/5
      Well written. While short, it almost could have been shorter. Still worth the while, fun to read.
    • 5/5
      Small Book; Big ThoughtsSize matters. It determines what any organism can do. Yet, size is relegated to the sidelines of scientific study. It is usually studied only as a corollary of another variable – speed, longevity or metabolism.John Tyler Bonner, a retired Princeton biology professor, changes that. By examining stories from “Alice in Wonderland” to “Gulliver’s Travels” grants size its scientific due. In this well-written and easily-understood book, Bonner spans the giants and dwarfs of the human, animal and plant kingdoms. He explores the physics of size in biology, its evolution and its role in the function and longevity of living things. Size rules all things: strength, surface, complexity, living processes and abundance. No endeavor escapes its tentacles. It is a small wonder that Bonner addresses his subject in as lucid and conversant manner as he does in this small, but pointed and thought-provoking book.Penned by the Pointed PunditNovember 10, 20068:56:31 PM

    Book preview

    Why Size Matters - John Tyler Bonner

    Bowen

    PREFACE

    Our interest in the size of things is entrenched in the human psyche. It reveals itself in literature from Gulliver’s Travels, to the Grimms’ fairy tales, to Alice in Wonderland. We see it in our daily thoughts of our growing children, of the people who are around us, of our pets, of the fish we catch, of the portions of the food we are served, of the clothes we buy—are you small, medium, or large?—and one could go on and on. There is hardly anything we observe in daily life that we, either consciously or unconsciously, do not take measure of its size. We love to measure everything with rulers and scales and clocks.

    I began to think of the matter of biological size years ago when I first read that glorious chapter in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form called On Magnitude. It is a model of insight, erudition, and beautiful prose. He showed me that size and shape are indeed interrelated and that the reason that this is so is a matter of physics that underlies the biology. From this initial inspiration there slowly grew inside me the feeling that there was a hidden other dimension of the subject that was eluding me. That inner feeling persisted for many years, and slowly something began to take shape. I am finally putting it all together in this book—I feel as though those shadowy thoughts have erupted through the surface.

    This book is a summary of those thoughts. It is an enormous subject that I try to bring down to reasonable dimensions so that I can include it all. As will be clear, I am interested in painting the big picture on a small canvas.

    If we are a bacterium, or an elephant, or a human being, we have our own size worlds, and for each of us there are things smaller and larger than ourselves. But no one can escape the universal rules imposed by size.

    In looking at the subject of biological size in its entirety, from large to small, from plant to animal to microbe, it will be evident that everything is interconnected. An examination of the effects of size is a way of bringing all life together.

    Just as the content of this book has almost taken a lifetime to mature, the actual writing has been an equally painful and slow process with innumerable adjustments and corrections in my course as I proceeded. These were greatly helped by the kindness and wisdom of numerous individuals to whom I am deeply indebted. Before I even began the book, my colleague Henry Horn was enormously helpful (as he has always been over the years) in purifying my thoughts about size. At a very early stage of writing I had the help of my friend Jonathan Weiner, who urged on me the need for a sense of direction. The first complete draft of this book (still in its underwear!) was prematurely sent to two anonymous readers, and while the comments of one of them were highly critical, they gave me the needed jolt at just the right moment. Later drafts were greatly improved due to the comments of Sam Elworthy, Brian Hall, Slawa Lamont, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and another anonymous reviewer. Also I want to thank David Kirk for his help with the section on Volvox and its relatives, and my colleague Ted Cox on some matters of physics. I almost feel as though they all ought to be listed as co-authors. My special thanks to Alice Calaprice and Deborah Tegarden for their skill and great help in seeing the book through its final stages of preparation. Finally I would like to thank Hannah Bonner for applying her superb illustrator skills to produce seven of the original drawings.

    MARGAREE HARBOUR

    Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

    WHY

    SIZE

    MATTERS

            CHAPTER 1        

    INTRODUCTION

    In the seventeenth century it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being—a homunculus—that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity—just like inflating a balloon. There were others, going back to the early ideas of Aristotle and the many who followed him, who took the view that vast changes in shape occurred between egg and adult, for it could be plainly seen that the early stages of development of any animal bore no resemblance to what came later. These two views frame the point I want to make in this book. In the case of the homunculus, shape is totally unconnected to size; as size increases shape remains unaltered. In the other case—now totally accepted—as size increases from egg to adult, the shape must change; there is no alternative.

    Let me put the matter in another way. If an engineer is commissioned to build two bridges, one across the Hudson River and the other across a brook no more than 30 feet wide, it is quite obvious that the two bridges will be very different in their appearance. Even more importantly, they will differ in their construction and materials. These differences will have nothing to do with the artistic whims of the engineer, at least for the larger bridge: they are absolute requirements. Any attempt to build the Hudson River bridge with wooden planks would collapse into the water long before it was finished. The elaborate steel trusses and the carefully designed architecture of the huge bridge are demanded by the width of the Hudson—it is dictated by its large size. As we shall see, this perfectly mirrors what happens in living organisms; they too cannot escape the conditions set by size; they have no choice.

    With these thoughts in mind, let me state the main argument of this book. Changes in size are not a consequence of changes in shape, but the reverse: changes in size often require changes in shape. To put it another way, size is a supreme regulator of all matters biological. No living entity can evolve or develop without taking size into consideration. Much more than that, size is a prime mover in evolution. There is abundant evidence for the natural selection of size, for both increases and decreases. Those size changes have the remarkable effect that they guide and encourage novelties in the structure of all organisms. Size is not just a by-product of evolution, but a major player. Size increase requires changes in structure, in function, and, as we will see, in other familiar evolutionary innovations. It requires them because they are needed for the individual to exist. Life would be impossible without the appropriate size-related modifications.

    The subject of size has not been ignored in the past. Quite to the contrary, and as will be clear in the pages to come, there is a great literature on matters of size, beginning with the Greeks and bursting into flower with Galileo. This is true for the West, and no doubt there are similar traditions in other cultures.

    However, the subject is always to some degree fragmented because it is generally introduced as an adjunct to some other biological phenomenon or property. For instance, the topic might be running speed, or rate of metabolism, or one of many other possibilities, and in the discussion of each of these phenomena the crucial role of size would be included. Many of the themes treated in this book can be found elsewhere. Here I wish to look at them from a different point of view—from the other end of the telescope—and show that the biological world revolves around size.

    The mindset that size is not a central issue is quite understandable. To say an elephant is big says nothing about all the things that make an elephant: its anatomy, its physiology, and even its behavior. These are the aspects that draw our attention and the matters we want to study. Yet size is an overarching issue. Its effect is something that no organism, from the smallest bacteria to the largest whale, can escape. It governs their shape and all their activities in a way that is of fundamental significance. Size dictates the characteristics of all living forms. It is the supreme and universal determinant of what any organism can be and can do. Therefore, why is it a subject that always resides in the wings rather than center stage?

    The main reason is that organisms are material objects while size is a bloodless geometric construct. Any object, whether animate or inanimate, will have a size. Airplanes, boats, or musical string instruments vary in size just like animals and plants, and in all cases their size and their material construction are totally different matters even though they affect one another.

    That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life’s matter in all its aspects. It is a universal frame from which nothing escapes.

    There are many things one wants to know about size, in particular those that concern its evolution. For instance, what is the evidence for my contention that size differences are a prime object of natural selection and are followed by changes in construction? What is the relation between size and internal complexity—that is, the division of labor—and, again, what is the evidence for which came first? What is the relation between size and the timing of all living activities such as the speed of movement of animals, or life span; and does size impose the timing, or the reverse? As we shall see, it is generally true that size is the prime mover: if size changes occur through the agency of natural selection, all those other matters must follow.

    SIZE RULES

    In the pages to come we will see many examples of where size rules life. They are supported by correlations in which various properties of organisms vary with size. It is these correlations that provide the foundation, the underpinning, for my contention that size rules life. The correlations can be stated in the form of five rules that will be briefly

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