Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [5]
All of that difference means that we can learn from insects without having to claim kinship so insistently, the way we do with the feathered and furred. As the famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins said in an article about the intelligent design controversy, "Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria." This unwillingness is particularly true for insects; it may seem improbable to imagine oneself related to microbes, but it does not offend. But to me that lack of identification with insects is precisely why we can look to them to gain insight into our own lives—we simply cannot anthropomorphize them into cute caricatures of humans.
Our inability to identify with insects can thus help keep us—and them—out of trouble, because we do not insist on making them into what they are not. Primates in particular, and especially chimpanzees, seem so much like little people that we almost cannot believe they are animals. When a pet chimp named Travis attacked a woman in Stamford, Connecticut, in 2009, people were shocked, mouthing, as Charles Siebert in the New York Times pointed out, many of the same platitudes as when the proverbially quiet neighbor goes on a murderous rampage. "He seemed so pleasant and mild-mannered." Siebert goes on to note, "There is something about chimpanzees—their tantalizing closeness to us in both appearance and genetic detail—that has always driven human beings to behavioral extremes, actions that reflect a deep discomfort with our own animality, and invariably turn out bad for both us and them."
We don't have the same problems with insects. They are so hard to anthropomorphize, and yet they still have that superficial similarity to us. They challenge us to find an explanation for a behavior without resorting to human-specific quirks of physiology or genetics. Insects allow us to study phenomena—the effect of personality type on health, say—without the confounding factor of the mechanism behind them. In other words, if being hard-driving makes people and rats more likely to die early, you don't know if it's because of the stress itself or because of a hormone such as cortisol that happens to be linked to stress in both cases. But if being hard-driving kills off both people and ants, there must be something in the stress itself that is responsible, because ants don't have the same hormones, or indeed virtually any of the same mechanisms for getting from the environment to the behavior, that people do.
I have rarely if ever found insects frightening, at least in the abstract. But I certainly find them unsettling, reminders of another world. I am in good company; Charles Darwin, in his recounting of his observations of tropical insects, found that the possibility of finding so many different species "is sufficient to disturb the composure of an entomologist's mind, to look forward to the future dimensions of a complete catalogue." Some of that is the lack of expression, of what the psychologists call affect, the outward manifestation of one's inner being. The great entomologist Vincent Dethier, who wrote eloquently about the smallest details of fly behavior, felt that the lack of expression in insects stood in the way of our empathy with them: "One empathizes less, if at all," he said, "with a beetle or a fly which has a comparatively immobile head than with a praying mantis that turns her head and stares at one." That lack of empathy is not a hindrance, at least in my mind, but a help. Dethier also said, "It may be, as Alexander Pope averred, that the proper