Greetings from Thumbelina

 

Some time ago, I posted a Darwin video about Thumbelina. This is a very old story, continually reappearing in new children’s books, about a young woman who is so small that she can hitch a ride on the back of a swallow or hide inside of a tulip (to use the two examples from our public library). We all know it is impossible to have a human being this small, but why is this so? 

Organisms can be very small. If you define an organism as something that can actively maintain constant internal conditions, and can reproduce itself, then the smallest organisms on Earth are bacteria and archaea. Viruses are smaller, but they cannot maintain constant internal conditions, or reproduce, by themselves; they have to outsource these processes to the cells that they parasitize. Astrobiologists (scientists who generate fact-based speculations about possible life on other planets) have lively disagreements about what the smallest life forms could be.

How small could a vertebrate be? A vertebrate is an animal that has (in addition to vertebrae) whole systems of organs that maintain constant internal conditions. Vertebrates are so complex that they could not possibly be microscopic.

But they can be pretty small. Scientists recently discovered a frog, Paedophryne amaneusis, that is so small that it can comfortably sit on a dime. X-rays reveal that it has a complete skeleton. It does not have a tadpole stage, but it attracts mates with ultrasonic peeps. I suspect that it does not need to have as much anatomical complexity to maintain internal conditions; for example, it probably absorbs most of the oxygen that it needs through its skin.

This image is from the source in this link.

Humans have seventy trillion cells. Would Thumbelina need to have seventy trillion very tiny cells? Probably not. She could have tiny organs that did everything that they needed to do, each organ with fewer and smaller cells.

But there is one organ that would need to have a minimum size: the brain. While Thumbelina could metabolize as she rode around on the back of a swallow, she would not be able to enjoy it, or even know what was happening. Since no one knows how to define consciousness, we cannot say how big a brain has to be to be conscious; but Thumbelina’s brain would definitely be too small.

Probably everyone has heard about the homunculus. This is supposedly a tiny complete person that lives inside of a sperm head, made famous by the Nicolaas Hartsoecker drawing (1695). According to many scientists of the late seventeenth century, that is where people came from: a little person inside a sperm grows up by consuming the food inside the egg. Some of the sperm had little men, some had little women, as in the drawing. Even more amazing, the male homunculi had sperm, with homunculi inside of them, with homunculi inside of them, with…how far can you go? Forever? Scientists at the time knew no reason to doubt it.

The reason that you cannot have an infinite regression of smaller and smaller objects is that everything is made of atoms. Although atoms are incredibly small, they are not infinitely small. This places a lower limit on the size of anything made out of atoms.

We must be careful to avoid the argument from incredulity: If I cannot believe it, then it cannot exist. Not long after I post this essay, a computer scientist might create a qubit structure that could fit inside Thumbelina’s head and impart a reasonable level of intelligence. But the principle remains unchanged: there is a lower limit of brain size for human intelligence, and Thumbelina is probably below that limit.

There are upper limits also. A very large walking vertebrate could not exist, since volume (weight) increases as the cube of the linear dimension while the strength of a leg increases only as the cross-sectional area (the square). An animal twice as big in linear dimensions would have legs four times as strong but would weigh eight times as much. This is true only for animals that walk on land. Whales can be much larger, but their weight is supported by the buoyant force of the water that they displace.

None of this will make any difference to people who are enjoying the new King Kong vs. Godzilla movie, or to my granddaughter who enjoys the Thumbelina books. But, I suspect, human imagination is limited—not by size, but by our evolutionary heritage. We imagine things that our evolved brains allow us to imagine, and nothing more.

 

Do Non-Human Animals Have Music? A Meditation on Shostakovich

This essay is a personal reflection on my encounter with a specific piece of music, not a general overview of the subject of animals and music, to which other scientists, not I, have devoted their careers. It is clear that many animals (including fruit flies) use sound for communication, especially for territories and mating. The sounds have patterns that scientists cannot resist calling musical. But maybe we are imputing our experiences onto the animal kingdom. We already do this when we call a beehive’s captive egg-laying machine a “queen.”

To me, the defining characteristic of music, rather than just pretty sounds, is the internal, mental effect that it has. In this, the musical experience is closely allied to the religious experience. And this is why the musical experience can be so powerful and so individual.

My first exposure to the Fifth Symphony of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was when the symphonic band I was in, early in graduate school, played a transcription of the finale. Shortly thereafter, in 1982, I bought the record of the Bernstein performance, and listened to it a lot. That was the same year that I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For me, and perhaps nobody else, the music and the novels were closely associated. Especially in the first movement of the symphony, I could hear The Lord of the Rings: the quiet dance of Luthien Tinuviel, in elfin mists and waterfalls, during a quiet throbbing of the strings; I also heard marching armies, attacking orcs, and prancing horses.

It was also at that time that I was experiencing, as young people often do, wrenching emotions, the kind that make no sense in retrospect but which are all-consuming when they occur. It was at this time that, to me, the slow climax of the strings in the middle of the finale (manuscript numbers 113-114) encapsulated my life. I felt this so strongly that I copied out the melody and taped it to my door. Certainly, for me, this symphony was a way of giving substance to my own personal and very intense emotions.

Recently I heard a performance of this symphony by the Tulsa Signature Symphony, led by Andrés Franco. It was certainly an intense performance; the maestro was practically dancing on the podium. The entire concert was, first, Franco’s explanation of how the symphony was written and its musical meaning; and, second, the symphony itself. I was surprised how many people besides myself enjoyed the lecture so much. It was from this lecture that I learned that the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony had intense emotional meaning to the Russians under Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship—almost a whole nation experiencing the kind of intensity in 1937 that I felt in 1982. During the first performance in the Soviet Union, many in the audience wept.

I had never thought about this until Maestro Franco explained it. The entire Soviet Union was under the most brutal form of dictatorship—the psychological form. Nobody could trust anyone else, even among friends and family. Any other person might tattle on you to the Soviet authorities, whereupon you would be arrested, imprisoned, and either killed or allowed to die. Millions died during Stalin’s purges and the famine that he directly caused by imposing the totally bogus genetic theories of pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko (see my earlier essay). Under such conditions, not only was it impossible to, without risking your life, to complain about Stalin, but it was impossible to even weep for the agony that he caused. Everyone was supposed to pretend to be happy little Communists. The performance of Shostakovich’s symphony was the only place in the USSR where you could cry in public and get away with it.

Dmitri Shostakovich stayed in the Soviet Union until his death in 1975, writing music that was as daring as he could get away with. After his death, his son Maxim and grandson Dmitri the younger defected to the United States.

The performance of this symphony was, for me, though perhaps less so than for the millions of people suffering under Stalin, a ravishing experience. A couple of parts in Franco’s performance were not what I expected. I have listened to the Leonard Bernstein recording for almost 40 years. The end of the finale, as performed by Bernstein, was like the bird of the spirit of the Russian people flying away into the sky. As Maestro Franco performed it, it sounded like this bird never quite got off the ground, dragged down because a gigantic soviet medallion draped around its neck, and it could barely rise any higher than the missile silos. But the tempo is the conductor’s prerogative.

This is what makes music what it is, as Maestro Franco explained. It unites us, despite the many other things that divide us. “Songs” do not unite birds; it is the means of their competition with one another for territory and for mates. At this time in American history (the performance was right in the middle of Trump’s impeachment trial, though nobody could have predicted this would happen), America needs something to bring us together. It is divided as it has perhaps never been since the Civil War. About half of Americans are perfectly satisfied with Trump declaring himself to be free of any constitutional constraints; to be, as the congressional prosecutors literally said the very day of the concert, a tyrant, a king, a dictator. We desperately need something to unite us. Politics certainly cannot. Even science (which the conservatives openly reject) cannot. Can music unite us? Perhaps it is music that will keep our very souls alive in coming years. It appears that music, especially that of Dmitri Shostakovich, was what kept the Russian soul alive during the dark Stalinist decades.