Many years ago I attended a lecture at NYU by Stephen Jay Gould. The lecture was called “Life in the Age of Prokaryotes”.
This was a deliberately provocative title for a scientific talk. There is generally a scientific consensus that the “age of prokaryotes” — or single celled organisms such as bacteria — has long been supplanted by the age of eukaryotes, or multi-cellular organisms such as insects and humans.
But Gould’s point was that nearly every living being on planet Earth is a prokaryote. The number of prokaryotes dwarfs the number of eukaryotes by a vast ratio.
When you look at the prokaryotes this way, you realize that it’s their planet. We just live in it.
I hadn’t thought about this lecture in many years. And then these recent unfortunate world events put it back into my mind.
As humans, we possess a certain hubris. We have a tendency to believe that all of existence — this planet, this universe — exists only for our benefit and our greater glory. So there can be a certain satisfaction in rhetorically pitting us against our tiny little bacterial rivals in a fight for world dominance.
But then something like this outbreak happens, and it becomes clear that Gould did not go far enough. Turns out it wasn’t the prokaryotes we needed to worry about, but something even smaller and more primitive — and more deadly.