Jul
6
“It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity—in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three—plants, animals, and fungi—are large enough to be seen by the human eye, and even they contain species that are microscopic… The world belongs to the very small—and it has for a very long time.”
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
