THE ELEPHANT & THE FLY A Rather Inconvenient Conversation About Humanity There is something gloriously ridiculous about putting an elephant and a fly together. One weighs several tons. The other can sit comfortably on the end of your nose. One moves through the world with the slow magnificence of a living mountain. The other arrives uninvited at your picnic, lands in the potato salad, irritates everybody and somehow escapes every attempt to murder it with a rolled-up newspaper. One may live for decades. The other may measure its existence in weeks. One possesses a brain weighing several kilograms. The other has a brain smaller than a grain of salt. And yet perhaps we should not be too quick to decide which creature has understood life better. Because the elephant and the fly have something rather important in common. Neither has invented a nuclear bomb. Neither has created a concentration camp. Neither has poisoned a river for profit. Neither h...