The Lying Stones of Marrakech (56 page)

Species can also share an environment without conflict when each experiences life on such a different temporal scale that no competitive interaction ever occurs. A bacterial life cycle of half an hour will pass beneath my notice and understanding, unless the population grows big enough to poison or crowd out something of importance to me. And how can a fruit fly ever experience me as a growing, changing organism if I manifest such stability throughout the fly's full life cycle of two weeks or so? The pre-Darwinian Scottish evolutionist Robert Chambers devoted a striking metaphor to this point when he wondered if the adult mayfly, during its single day of earthly life, might mistake the active metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog for proof of the immutability of species, since no visible change would occur during the mayfly's entire lifetime. (And so, Chambers argued by extension, we might miss the truth of evolution if the
process unrolled so slowly that we could never notice any changes during the entire history of potential human observation.) Chambers wrote in 1844:

Suppose that an ephemeron [a mayfly], hovering over a pool for its one April day of life, were capable of observing the fry of the frog in the waters below. In its aged afternoon, having seen no change upon them for such a long time, it would be little qualified to conceive that the external branchiae [gills] of these creatures were to decay, and be replaced by internal lungs, that feet were to be developed, the tail erased,.and the animal then to become a denizen of the land.

Since organisms span such a wide range of size, from the invisible bacterium to the giant blue whale (or to the fungus that underlies a good part of Michigan), the second, or spatial, strategy of coexistence by imperception achieves special prominence in nature. This concept can ‘best be illustrated by an example that has become something of a cliché (by repetition for appropriateness) in intellectual life during the past decade.

To illustrate his concept of “fractals,” mathematical curves that repeat an identical configuration at successively larger or smaller scales ad infinitum, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot asked a disarmingly simple question with a wonderfully subtle nonanswer: how long is the coastline of Maine? The inquiry sounds simple but cannot be resolved without ambiguity, for solutions depend upon the scale of inquiry, and no scale can claim a preferred status. (In this respect, the question recalls the classic anecdote, also told about folks “down East” in Maine, of a woman who asks her neighbor, “How's your husband?”— and receives the answer, “Compared to what?”)

If I'm holding an atlas with a page devoted to the entire state of Maine, then I may measure a coastline at the level of resolution permitted by my source. But if I use a map showing every headland in Acadia National Park, then the equally correct coastline becomes much longer. And if I try to measure the distance around every boulder in every cove of Acadia, then the length becomes ever greater (and increasingly less meaningful as tides roll and boulders move). Maine has no single correct coastline; any proper answer depends upon the scale of inquiry.

Similarly for organisms. Humans rank among the largest animals on earth, and we view our space as one might see all of Maine on a single page. A tiny organism, living in a world entirely circumscribed by a single boulder in a cove,
will therefore be completely invisible at our scale. But neither of us sees “the world” any better or any more clearly. The atlas defines my appropriate world, while the boulder defines the space of the diatom or rotifer (while the rotifer then builds the complete universe of any bacterium dwelling within).

We need no Status Quo to share space with a bacterium, for we dwell in different worlds of a common territory—that is, unless we interfere or devise a way to intrude: the bacterium by generating a population large enough to incite our notice or cause us harm;
Homo sapiens
by inventing a microscope to penetrate the world of the invisible headland on a one-page map of the earth.

Frankly, given our aesthetic propensities, we would not always wish to perceive these smaller worlds within our domain. About 40 percent of humans house eyebrow mites, living beneath our notice at the base of hair follicles above our eyes. By ordinary human standards, and magnified to human size, these mites are outstandingly ugly and fearsome. I would just as soon let them go their way in peace, so long as they continue the favor of utter imperceptibility. And do we really want to know the details of ferocious battles between our antibodies and bacterial invaders—a process already distasteful enough to us in the macroscopic consequence of pus? (Don't get me wrong. As a dedicated scientist, I do assert the cardinal principle that we always want to know intellectually, both to understand the world better and to protect ourselves. I am just not sure that we should always crave visceral perception of phenomena that don't operate at our scale in any case.)

Finally, this theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general (but that have, in my opinion, been grossly oversimplified and exaggerated for their perceived news-worthiness). One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.

Why should we privilege one scale over another, especially when a fractal world can express the same form at every scale? Is my hair follicle, to an eyebrow mite, any less of a universe than our entire earth to the Lord of Hosts (who might be a local god as tiny as a mite to the great god of the whole universe—who then means absolutely nothing in return to the mite on my eyebrow)? And yet each denizen of each scale may perceive an appropriate universe with impeccable, but local, factual accuracy.

We don't have to love or even to know about all creatures of other scales (although we have ever so much to learn by stretching our minds to encompass, however dimly and through our own dark glasses, their equally valid universes). But it is good and pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity—each with some room of one's own.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce the images herein:

All other images appearing throughout are from the author's collection.

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