Super-Size Me
Big is not always better, but it can certainly make you feel like it.
WHY SIZE MATTERS
From Bacteria to Blue Whales
By John Tyler Bonner
Princeton Univ. 161 pp. $16.95
SIZE MATTERS
How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys -- and the Men They Become
By Stephen S. Hall
Houghton Mifflin. 388 pp. $26
One of the most memorable passages in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels comes when the sojourner Lemuel Gulliver encounters a bevy of Brobdingnagian maidens disrobing. Far from the delightful voyeuristic experience Gulliver might have hoped for, he sees naked giantesses, 12 times human size, as if through a powerful magnifying glass: "Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons."
I think we're all with Gulliver here. Evolutionary biologist John Tyler Bonner uses the traveler's horrifying encounter with zaftig beauty to underscore a recurring theme in his new book, Why Size Matter s: Big is not always better, and size is always comparative. From the perspective of a unicellular pond-dwelling paramecium, humans are the size of a galaxy; next to the blue whale, we are minuscule. Yet all three organisms, from the single-celled to the gazillion-celled, are perfectly adapted for their niche in our complex world.
Bonner argues that size is a driving force for all of biology. He uses the fictional Brobdingnagians (and their teensy counterparts, the Lilliputians) as an object lesson, gently critiquing Swift's wrongheaded science to demonstrate why such races are a biological impossibility. In real life, he demonstrates convincingly, size dictates everything from an animal's shape and appearance to its locomotion, speed, voice and social organization. If Swift had had the good fortune to study biology under Bonner (and the physics behind it), Brobdingnagians and Lilliputians would likely have looked -- and acted -- much, much different.
Bonner clearly loves his subject. The Princeton professor's passions are ecology and evolution, and his graceful prose is complemented by illustrations, graphs and formulas for those who want scientific rigor. He also intertwines a cultural tour of humans' preoccupation with matters of girth, strength, height, weight and shape. So, along with slime molds, geckos and fairy flies, we encounter Sinbad the Sailor, Tom Thumb and Alice shrinking and growing in Wonderland, all offered as evidence of Bonner's concluding thought: "Size rules life."
