Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [67]
Part of what seemed to get the public so excited about Featherstone's work was the idea that it wasn't a gene, but "a chemical" that altered the sexual behavior of the flies, which led to the speculation about popping a pill to change one's sexual orientation. If what's sauce for the fly is sauce for the human, this could mean that chemicals in our own nervous systems are involved with sexual orientation, too. But I don't find this in the least alarming, or indicative of some dystopian possibility of transforming people from gay to straight and back again. The truth is that chemicals no more control who we are sexually attracted to than they do anything else. Which is to say, everything and nothing.
Chemicals are where the body's rubber meets its road. They are how our genes exert their influence. It's fine to say that a gene controls eye color, or digestive speed, or whether we like mangoes, but what does that mean? Somewhere, a chemical is involved. Better living through chemistry? It's more like living through chemistry, period. Featherstone's lab has winkled the details out of the devil by connecting the gene to the proteins it codes for and the action of the substances those proteins control. None of that alters the crucial role of experience, even in a creature such as the fruit fly.
What does Featherstone himself want to do with this information? He doesn't seem motivated to get in the pocket of Big Pharma and develop a drug to enable people to go from straight to gay. Presumably he recognizes that this isn't possible. But he has some ideas. Going back to his website, "An understanding of Drosophila neuroscience raises the possibility that we may be able to engineer a ruthless bionic insect army, and use it to take over the world. From our despotic biotechnological throne, we can seek revenge on everyone who ever wronged us. What's that? A buzzing in your ear? I hope you're on OUR side."
All I can say is that I assume he is saying this with tongue in cheek. I really do.
Chapter 7
Parenting and the Rotten Corpse
I HAVE never understood why nature shows on animal families are always filled with images of doting monkeys nursing their infants, or diligent songbirds delivering a beak full of worms to the nest, when much more tender sacrifice takes place under leaf litter in the garden. If you want an ideal example of a good animal mother, for my money you can't do better than an earwig. Now there's a devoted parent for you. After they lay their eggs, earwig mothers stand protectively over the clutch, scrubbing them clean of fungus and other nasty contaminants and keeping predators at bay. Once the eggs hatch into minuscule copies of their parent, mama earwig goes resolutely out into the world to catch prey in the form of aphids and other tiny invertebrates for her brood. In some species, the female digests the food first and then regurgitates it to her begging offspring, as if offering a squalling infant a bottle. If the young earwigs signal their distress, she responds to the solicitation with eager defensiveness. Oh, and that business about them climbing onto people's heads and into their ears? Utter nonsense. According to entomologist James Costa, the name was probably originally ear-wing, after the resemblance of the insect's hind wing to a human ear (honestly, I don't see it, but that's an urban legend for you). How that got transmogrified into an auricular horror story is anyone's guess.
I happen to have an admittedly unpopular fondness for earwigs, but there are a lot of other good insect parents out there. The real champions, of course, are the social insects such as bees and ants, in which the mother goes into the hive or nest after a brief mating flight, never to emerge again. Day in and day out for months, sometimes years, the queen mother produces egg after glistening egg, like chocolates on an assembly line, forswearing any