Species Density

Species Density

Mother Nature does not like too much connectivity and globalization—(biological, cultural, or economic). One of the privileges I got as a result of the book was meeting Nathan Myhrvold, the type of person I wish were cloned so I could have one copy here in New York, one in Europe, and one in Lebanon. I started meeting with him regularly; every single meeting has led to a big idea, or the rediscovery of my own ideas through the brain of a more intelligent person—he could easily claim co-authorship of my next book. The problem is that, unlike Spyros and those very few others, he does not have his conversations while walking (though I met him in excellent restaurants).

Myhrvold enlightened me about an additional way to interpret and prove how globalization takes us into Extremistan: the notion of species density. Simply, larger environments are more scalable than smaller ones—allowing the biggest to get even bigger, at the expense of the smallest, through the mechanism of preferential attachment we saw in Chapter 14. We have evidence that small islands have many more species per square meter than larger ones, and, of course, than continents. As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute—we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers, and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively. Cultural life will be dominated by fewer persons: we have fewer books per reader in English than in Italian (this includes bad books). Companies will be more uneven in size. And fads will be more acute. So will runs on the banks, of course.

Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and prevent travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs—and few people are. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.