Too Big Not to Fail

By Christopher Ketcham

THE NEXT TIME I HEAR a politico or banker or Detroit 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 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. Dinosaurs, as we all know, were likely the biggest creatures to walk the Earth, but bigness didn’t help them meet the challenge of changing conditions. The largest of the dinosaurs disappeared altogether, the smaller ones got even smaller and eventually evolved into birds, while the animals of more moderate size, the marsupials and primitive mammals, found that being small in the first place was a blessing.

On the cellular level, biologists have long understood that large cells, the kind found in cancer, are always unstable and heading for collapse. In physics, too, the principle of right size holds fast. “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert,” writes Sir George Thomson, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, “but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special efforts . . . one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities.” As with atoms and empires, so also the stars, which when grown too big will collapse under their own weight in the spectacle of the supernova. So also for animal communities, which rarely aim for bigness. Birds fledge their nests; they don’t keep crowding in. Bees and ants split their colonies when they grow too large, decentralization as instinct. Trees self-prune when laden with too much ice or snow or assailed by wind, dropping limbs to sustain the trunk. Naturalized goldfish in the carp family, kept in an outdoor garden, will only grow to a size proportionate to their pond—unless they are fed (and if fed too much, they grow terribly obese and soon lose the knack for swimming, procreating, and everything else that makes a fish a fish).

Nothing in nature just keeps growing, except where the usual evolutionary constraints are removed from the picture. Isolation from predators, in the example of island gigantism, allowed a host of species to grow to outsize proportions. The elephant bird of Madagascar, the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant ducks of Hawaii, the giant rabbits of Mediterranean islands, the famed dodo—all were extinguished at astonishing speed after meeting the wily Homo sapiens and his diminutive camp followers (dogs, cats, rats). Without effective competition to keep them fit, the island gigantics were in fact terribly vulnerable when conditions changed.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.