[...
> The bacteria are disadvantaged - since they can't easily cooperate with
> one another, and build large structures - and such cooperation seems to
> pay off.
>
> They have been (literally) overshadowed - and relegated to the nooks and
> crannies of the world.  These days much of the work gets done by
> macroscopic organisms - such as trees.
>
> Once bacteria ruled the world - but now they in the middle of
> a period of decline.  Their decline seems likely to continue - as much
> of the world's chemical processing gets taken over by machines - who will
> have stolen the bacteria's enzymatic secrets from their genomes.
> -- 
> __________
>  |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
>

This anthropocentric misinformation that you've slipped in at multiple
points in this thread has no factual basis and no support in real science.
There have been at least half a dozen articles in just the past few years in
Science and Nature alone that point towards an inverse scale free
relationship between organism size and organism density.  That is, the very
smallest organisms outnumber slightly larger organisms by orders of
magnitude, and outnumber even larger organisms by many more orders of
magnitude.  In fact the largest organisms on Earth (ourselves among them)
make up only a minute fraction of the global biomass.

Wipe out every multicellular organism on Earth and single-celled life will
barely take notice.  Take out the single-celled microbial contingency and
every ecosystem on Earth will collapse in short order.  We are pawns in a
microbial world.

[See e.g. Marquet, Invariants, Scaling Laws, and Ecological Complexity.
Science 289, 1487-8, for a good commentary and chain-of-reference
jumpstart.]
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