By Ira Hird Plenty Of Room At The Bottom

As I was reading the essay written by Myra Hird, titled Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Thinking Bacteria, there were a couple of concepts and explanations that intrigued me. The first was directly paralleled to McFall Ngai’s work regarding a living organism as a community. Hird broadens this revelation and claims, “Each living creature must be looked as a microcosm –a little universe” (Hird 21). It can be then generalized that each microbial community resides in a living creature that is infinitely large. Each community has its own role and must fulfill it to survive in the universe (See Attached Figure 1). As humans, we tend to think not of microbial life as significant but rather minuscule. This notion of anthropocentrism is considered, then, to be invalid. While it may not be fully understood by us as to why, bacterial life is the origins of life and this idea is supported by evolution. Moreover, bacterial life, if destroyed from all of Earth, then life would cease to exist, whereas if bacterial life were …show more content…
As the author points out, humanity is very simplistic. It is organized in two levels: Biotic and Cultural. The idea of society and culture as being the differing factor from other species was discarded after Garry Runciman. His argument is that cultural and societal selection is a series of sequential and mutually interacting processes that intersected between all organisms. An example of ‘game birds’ was given. Human classification of creatures as being ‘game birds’ is a cultural selected idea. After hunting these birds to the near point of extinction, various laws (social) were implicated for the protection of ‘game birds’ and these laws were then followed and broken. If the ‘game birds’ became extinct, then the environmental niches (natural) are then changed. This cycle seems to be in motion due to the fundamentals of human society: natural (biotic) and cultural (See Attached Figure