Why Ant-man is the worst superhero ever.
What if we were much smaller? Well, there’s good and bad news. The good news is that we could adopt simpler body forms, but that’s about it. The bad news? Pfft.
First. we would probably be much dumber than we are. Zoom in closely on the brain of every animal and you’ll find neurons, cells that communicate to one another using electrical or chemical signals. Hundreds to thousands of these neurons form dense and complicated circuits with one another in the vertebrate brain. Such circuits form pathways that tend to perform specific functions in the body. For instance, there are specific regions of the brain designated for movement, for regulating sleep, for hunger, for balance, for typing “guns and missiles”, and for interpreting the sights, sounds, and smells from the world. Our bodies may be able to shrink in size and still function to some degree, but our neurons cannot only be miniaturized and still function with such complex synchrony and elegance. As we grow significantly smaller, we run out of room for neurons very rapidly.
“But Kevin, I’ve always heard that a big head doesn’t mean make you smarter”. Don’t you sass me. But you are right, anonymous naysayer. There is admittedly weak evidence that intelligence correlates with head volume, yes, but that’s among humans of relatively the same size [3]. For example, my fiancée is tiny and adorable, though she’s likely smarter than I am (Fiancée et al, 2014). However, when we’re talking about a difference in scale between us and a mouse, size matters. We have nearly half the number of neurons as the U.S. military has guns and missiles, something around 86 billion neurons [5]. Mice have around 10 million. Ants have around 200,000. To put this into perspective, if each neuron were a person, our brains would outnumber earth’s human population 12 times over. A mouse’s would be constrained to the size of North Carolina. An ant’s would be Laredo, Texas. It’s hard to grow intellectually when you’re Laredo, Texas.
I apologize to anyone from or living in the city limits of Laredo. I did not mean to say your city is dumb. However, it certainly looks that way. I’ve visited your website. It looks terrible.
Come to Laredo and visit our…moon.
Being the size of an insect would present a number of other challenges. The interactions we have with things in our environment (like the water we drink and the food we eat) conform to the laws of physics. As we shrink in scale, these interactions change. To an ant, water seems as viscous as maple syrup. Gravity takes a backseat to air turbulence. As Steven Jay Gould writes, “An ant-sized man might don some clothing, but surface adhesion would preclude its removal. The lower limit of drop size would make showering impossible; each drop would hit with the force of a large boulder. If our homunculus managed to get wet and tried to dry off with a towel, he would be stuck to it for life. He could pour no liquid, light no fire…” [2].
Could an ant-sized version of early man have developed civilization even if intelligence were not a factor? Probably not, at least not at the same rate or with the same level of success. I imagine cultivating agricultural crops, one of the supposed precursors for civilization, would have been near impossible, not to mention cross-breeding them for good yield. Our meat-based diet would be replaced with who knows what, but I suppose it would include plant material and any nearby organism that decides to die. For that matter, hunting would be folly; spears and bows would be completely ineffective because we probably couldn’t put enough force behind the blow. Guns and missiles wouldn’t exist. Our predators would vastly rise in number, distancing us from the top of the food web. We’d be stomped into submission by the elements, by other creatures, and by our own ineffectiveness. Switzerland would be near impossible to get to. So long, Mürren.
What about food? Shouldn’t food be more abundant since, you know, one kernel of corn could feed an entire village of people? That’s true, but there’s a much bigger caveat to this than you’d think. The world’s food is spatially patchy. I don’t just mean that bananas only grow in the tropics or that rice grows best in silty soil. I mean that, when you’re the size of an ant, getting a bug from the ground nearby is a marathon. Food sources are really f**king far apart, but plentiful once they’re found. Many animals that live upon such food sources adopt life strategies to cope with smorgasbord-style resources. Some insects that exploit huge but infrequent foods, including flies like the gall midge, have adaptations that allow them to exploit them quickly. Gall midges typically reproduce sexually, though it takes a long time for larvae to develop this way. When midges find a mushroom, a gold mine on their scale, females reproduce without a male through a process called parthenogenesis. These offspring are formed more quickly than doing things via the sexual route, though it comes at a cost to the mother. Instead of developing externally, the larvae grow inside the mother, eventually liquefying her insides and bursting from her lifeless husk [4]. However, immature as they may be, they are ready to start chomping away on some sweet sweet mushroom bits and rotting parts of their mommah. D’awww. Overall, the flies have more successful babies this way, thus the need for bursting out of their moms and such.
Will humans do that? I dunno. That sounds desperate. But food would likely be lacking for most humans on earth. Maybe we’d be as successful as ants and develop complex chemical signals to communicate the locations of food, bypassing any other weird adaptations like the ones midges have . Maybe we wouldn’t, and we’d fill just another tiny niche in the complex world which we inhabit.
So, I hope you now understand how important our size is for our survival. We are big and scary creatures, and that’s allowed us to hunt and kill and eat meats and make pizzas and build guns and missiles. But we’re not so large that joint damage, eating entire herds of cattle per day, and toppling over and breaking bones would be a daily norm. We’re also not so small either that we can’t take showers or cultivate food. So, here we stand, results of the goal-less, powerful, yet delicate hands of natural selection. Just right.
Nobody comments on my stuff. You should comment on my stuff. Get your friends to comment on my stuff. I will then comment. We can all comment. It will be a great world full of comments.
WE HAVE GUN AND MISSILE CONFERENCES!!! HUMANITY, BITCHES!!!
Literature Sources:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber’s_law
[2] “Ever Since Darwin” by Steven Jay Gould, Norton & Co. 1977
[3] http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/brain-size2.htm
[4]http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/ontogeny/p0306.htm
[5] http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full#B24
Badass Biology 