When a cleric asked the evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane what his extensive study of the natural world revealed about the nature of God, he famously replied that He must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles. This was in reference to their huge diversity: there are over 400,000 described species of beetles (with perhaps another 600,000 still to be discovered).
Haldane could also perhaps have replied that He must have an inordinate fondness for parasites. I don’t blame Him – they’re fascinating (and perhaps, in part at least, responsible for the evolution of sex, so we all have a lot to thank them for).
I’ve been following Parasite of the Day for a while now, and enjoyed their end of the year summary – in which they calculate that it would take 295 years of blogging to cover just the known multicellular parasites.
And as Stephen Jay Gould amply explains in his book, Life’s Grandeur, we multicellular creatures are a mere statistical anomaly – so scarce as to be statistically insignificant (and our importance nothing but the product of a deranged imagination...). The mode of life is bacterial. I’m not sure what that says about God, but I like to keep it in mind. It’s good to know one’s place.
;)
01 January 2011
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2 comments:
Loved that! Plenty to think about and a good collection of links too - oh for the time to follow everything up!
Thank you. I'm glad you liked it, typos and all!
Ah, time. If there's one thing we can be certain of it's that we'll run out of time before we run out of interesting things to spend it on.
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