The Curse of Bigness
The next time I hear a politico or banker or corporate executive talk about institutions “too big to fail,” I’ll direct them to the 34 percent of Americans who are obese. Last I heard, these big Americans, themselves a kind of cultural institution, were failing en masse, racked by diabetes, asthma, heart trouble, and bound for early death. The human form can only grow so big. Or I could point them to Pig #6707. Conceived in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the 1990s, Pig #6707’s embryo was genetically altered with a human growth gene to develop into a super-pig, bigger and faster-growing and more productive of meat. But the genetic alterations produced a monster, impotent and nearly blind, its legs arthritic, its body crippled, the creature able to stand up and be photographed only with the support of a plywood board. When asked by a reporter why he created the sick pig, the lead researcher said his intent was to make livestock more efficient.
There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail — a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size. All living things have a right size, and historically evolved to that size because it was optimal for survival. So, for example, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceroses, though comparatively huge, are in fact just the right size — their bigness operating as a defense against predators, allowing for greater reach in forage, and much else. The same goes for polar bears and walruses and whales, which require extra tissue volume to retain heat against cold water and long winters.
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