If microorganisms
could write, their story might also seem vaguely familiar to a work also laden
with metaphorical baggage. With your lenses, you have fallen, Alice-like, into
a round hole, and just as Alice-like, the results completely alter your perception
of reality. At first, the denizens of this tiny world reveal no sense of
purpose, no sense of direction, no awareness of past, present, or future,
nothing that connects them to any familiar sign posts or behavioral traits by
which we negotiate the realms of money, health, military adventure,
agriculture, politics, sex, sports, or religion. You do not belong in this
realm you have just entered; you have no idea what processes actually govern
its existence, what its inhabitants do for a living, or how they got
there. Only your education prevents you
from deciding, like long-ago ancestors would have done, that they simply
appeared spontaneously. Slowly, very slowly, your evolved internal wiring,
established neural circuits, and past experiences, begin to re-assert
themselves. You are, after all, a human being; if you have any power at all, it
is to impose your will on nature, at least in terms of interpretation. They
eat; they mate; and, they fight, just like I do, you think. Suddenly they sort
themselves out into a pattern you recognize: thousands of them, all vibrating
and smacking into one another, have gathered around an air bubble. Oh, you
think; they need air; they want air. You have absolutely no idea whatsoever
what they need; they are incapable of want. Your conclusion is fantasy. Five
minutes have now passed. What you have
seen through this lens is an irresistible drive to impose your own guiding
mythology on the natural world and thus believe that you have, in fact, also
imposed your will.
But you cannot control what happens in this jar of grass, water, and time
without creating a human work of art. You can kill everything with heat or
hydrochloric acid; you can change the community makeup by adding a handful of
rice or fish food; you can decide whether to let the water evaporate or keep it
filled to a certain mark; and, if you’re really a masochist, you can try to
isolate one of the community members in “pure” culture. But once you perform
any of these acts, you’ve created something that would not have otherwise
occurred naturally. The blasé ease with which you add that handful of rice
mimics our approach to nature in general, whether it be mowing the yard,
planting trees, digging a ship channel through the Mississippi River Delta, or
burning Amazon forest at the rate of fifty acres a minute, year after year.
Eventually the infusion culture will collapse, no matter what you do.
Eventually there will be no more movement under the lens. The difference
between your jar and the tropical forest is one of the big take-home lessons:
you can start another jar, generating that mystery at will, but you can never
replace the biological diversity lost when that forest is gone.
The epigraph from chapter 4, Through a Lens
But what’s to come of it?
Nothing, as far as I know: because most students go there to make money
out of science, or to get a reputation in the learned world. But in
lens-grinding, and discovering things hidden from our sight, these count for
naught. And I am satisfied too that not one man in a thousand is capable of
such study . . . And over and above all, most men are not curious to know: nay,
some even make no bones about saying, What does it matter whether we know this
or not?
—Antony van
Leeuwenhoek, 1715, in
a letter to Gottfried Leibniz explaining why he is not training people to grind
lenses.
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