The book is a clever exercise in scale, enlisting our human solipsism in understanding life-forms radically different from us by placing them in a comparative human context - for instance, a single drop of seawater can contain up to twenty million microbes, which Davies points out is about the same as the number of residents of New York State, and a teaspoon of soil can be populated by a billion microbes, comparable to the number of humans populating all of India. It’s a staggering realization even for grownups, so how are tiny humans to grapple with these tiny organisms and their enormous impact on us and the rest of life? That’s what zoologist and children’s book author Nicola Davies explores in Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes ( public library), with gorgeous art by English illustrator Emily Sutton - a marvelous addition to the best children’s books celebrating science. “You are mostly not you,” microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in his fascinating exploration of the human microbiome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |