I’ll never forget the realization that came with my first foray into astronomy: we are much too small to matter, or to understand anything. Deep within The Reader, I’ve stumbled upon a series of clues. Taken together, they suggest that I was quite right to lament our stature, but wrong to think that we are too big. The truth ended up being so obvious that I feel the fool for not seeing it earlier. The evidence is all around us, even as I write this. Stephen Jay Gould, one of…