• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 340 0

grows and how many offspring it has. If you live hard and die young, but grow quickly and have your children early, you may end up leaving as many genes in the next generation as someone who grows more slowly, dies at an older age, and paced his or her reproduction more prudently over time. In other words, you could have a personality and life history more like a rabbit or one more like an elephant, and still be a member of the same species—an individual with characteristics at one of the opposite ends of the spectrum. Again, both styles can be maintained via evolution. The question is whether having an aggressive or bold personality is linked with a tendency to die sooner or have more offspring, something that bears investigation.

Another implication of personalities for evolution is that they make behavior less flexible. In an article summarizing recent work on animal personalities, Alison Bell from the University of Illinois said, "Animals do not always change their behavior as much as they should." While that "should" seems a wee bit judgmental to me (who are we scientists to decree endless flexibility among our animal subjects?), remember Ralph Waldo Emerson's admonition that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." It is nice to think that insects and we have an equal opportunity to show small-mindedness, but what is the cause of this limitation? Bell speculates that it might just be too hard to change one's personality under different circumstances, even if it would theoretically be advantageous to do so; shifting around the hormones and nervous system reactions might require too much retooling of basic physiology. If the same evolutionary costs and benefits apply to human personalities, we may be better able to understand why some apparently counterproductive ways of coping in humans persist, and ultimately, why we have personalities at all.

Can We Have "A Feeling for the Organism" if the Organism Lacks Them?

IN EVELYN Fox Keller's 1983 biography of Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock, some of the geneticist's success is attributed to her "feeling for the organism," a way of understanding her scientific subjects that transcended traditional scientific data collection. Keller describes how the scientist had to immerse herself in the minute details of her study subject, understand "how it grows, understand its parts, understand when something is going wrong with it." The book, titled A Feeling for the Organism, became something of a symbol of science needing something more than facts and charts, requiring in addition an emotional investment from the investigator that verges on the mystical.

This all sounds fine and inspirational, until you discover that the subjects of McClintock's fascination are corn plants. Dotty gardeners cooing to their tomatoes aside, identification with anything other than pets and perhaps a few other animals such as wolves or ravens seems like so much New Age claptrap. But according to Keller, McClintock felt that people had a "tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms." If that underestimation is true for corn, it is doubly so for insects. The idea that they are all alike, with identical reactions and identical lives, used to be unquestioned, as T. H. White illustrated. Now, though, we know better. The famous entomologist Vincent Dethier, author of the masterful book To Know a Fly and discoverer of many important aspects of insect neurobiology, fretted about the likelihood that his subjects had internal lives. In a 1964 essay about the continuum between insect and vertebrate brains, he said, "Perhaps these insects are little machines in a deep sleep, but looking at their rigidly armored bodies, their staring eyes, and their mute performances, one cannot help at times wondering if there is anyone inside." Nearly half a century later, and with the appropriate caveats about personality sans expression, the answer seems to be yes.

Chapter 4

Seinfeld and the Queen

IN Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld plays a slacker honeybee, yearning for a life beyond