Thinking Small and Large - Peter Forbes ***

I've a huge amount of time for Peter Forbes as a writer. Both his The Gecko's Foot on the science behind some of nature's most remarkable abilities and Dazzled and Deceived on mimicry and camouflage in nature and human endeavour were brilliant. But I'm afraid I found it harder to engage with Thinking Small and Large. There's plenty of good stuff in it, but it didn't grab me in the same way.

The topic here is the fundamental importance of microbes to life on Earth. By microbes, he is referring to single-celled organisms including bacteria, archaea, algae, fungi, protists and viruses, though Forbes does also point how much even in multi-celled organisms (like us) the important stuff happens on a microscopic scale.

We start off by looking how we naturally incline to what we can see and directly experience - and how the common cultural idea that humans are in control of life on Earth (a concept that was originally down to divine intent, but now is more technological) leads us astray. Reading this feels a bit like being told off, which isn't a good start. We then get into theories of how life came into existence and, for instance, the importance of the Krebs cycle, so beautifully explored in Nick Lane's Transformer (Lane gets plenty of acknowledgment). From here we take on the role of microbial life in natural cycles, the formation complex cells (in part by absorbing microbes, notably mitochondria), and so forth.

Things are pulled together (circling back to the original telling off) with the dangers of 'sapioncentralism' - this is a little different from human exceptionalism which is when biologists moan that humans aren't special (which clearly they are in some ways). Rather it suggests that we shouldn't take our special nature to mean we are independent of or can ignore all other life, a viewpoint that, as Forbes points out, is distinctly undermined by the Covid pandemic, not to mention the vast numbers of ways that microbes are essential for the planet as a whole to function and to be habitable for us.

The final chapter is probably the most interesting, where we are told 'how bacteria can create a parallel, fossil-free carbon economy'. Here we see how single-celled protein could 'per unit land... reach an over ten-fold higher protein yield and at the least twice the caloric yield compared with any staple crop.' We then go on to see how good use of bacteria can enhance conventional crops, and, for instance, the use of bacteria to produce ethanol from waste gases (fuel that does produce carbon dioxide when burned, but at least it would have gone into the atmosphere anyway).

As that chapter demonstrates, there is plenty of interesting stuff in this book, and I'd encourage you to buy it - but aspects of it didn't work for me as a reader.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here