Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [9]
It's simple, I responded. You've never seen them because you don't have anything that they want. But now you know they are there, and what they are doing. And things will never be the same.
It is exactly this feeling of a mysterious intricate drama being played out under our noses while most people remain unaware of its existence that makes us keep wanting to understand the lives of insects. Their stories seem unbelievable, with each life cycle, each mating ritual, more extraordinary than the last, and yet they are true. The rest of this book goes to places most people never see, as scientists uncover their secrets with techniques as new as proteomics and as old as a nose buried in the grass watching the bugs go by. We are changing our minds about what it takes to learn, about the nature of individuality, and about what a gene really does, all because of insects and the way they both reveal and reflect our own lives.
Authors write fiction about parallel universes, they ponder the possibility of supernatural beings, maybe even the spirits of the departed, traveling in our midst. The ability to glimpse another world is always touted as an allure for those who dabble in the paranormal. But who needs to be able to see dead people when you can see live insects?
Chapter 1
If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?
Learning on Six Legs
THE FAMOUS eighteenth-century naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre meticulously examined the mason bees of his native France, marveling at the tiny clay cells they constructed as cradles for their helpless larvae. When the young bee is ready to emerge, under the normal scheme of things it scissors its way out of the clay with its mandibles and squeezes through the opening. But Fabre, like calculating scientists before and after him, tested the ability of the bees to think by examining how they were able to overcome various manipulations of their chambers. First, he thwarted a bee by removing part of the clay and replacing it with a piece of paper. Undaunted, it sliced through the paper with the same motions it used for the thicker material. Then Fabre presented the young bee with not one, but two barriers: the usual clay, and paper a half inch in front of it, so that the insect needed to repeat the motion it had performed on the original cell on the paper. This it was unable to do, instead tapping fruitlessly at the paper it was completely capable of cutting through. Two barriers are never found in nature, and the bee couldn't perform acts outside its repertoire; we now know that it lacks the kind of neurological GPS ("if a new roadblock appears, repeat steps A through G until you see air") necessary to adapt to altered circumstances. Fabre tut-tutted over the bee's ineptitude, noting, "The insect would have to repeat the act which it has just accomplished, the act which it is not intended to perform more than once in its life; it would, in short, have to make into a double act that which by nature is a single one; and the insect cannot do this, for the sole reason that it has not the wish to. The Mason-bee perishes for lack of the smallest gleam of intelligence."
Later scientists were equally condescending, noting with belittling superiority that although quite a few kinds of insects can perform remarkable tasks, they cannot learn from experience the way we humans can. In the late nineteenth century, the English physician David Douglas Cunningham was posted to the Indian Medical Service in Calcutta, where in addition to studying the pathology of infectious diseases he made detailed observations of the local flora and fauna, including the many large and easily observed insects. He was prepared to admit that some of the large wasps that provisioned their young with paralyzed caterpillars and other prey possessed something along the lines of what he termed intellect, given their complex behavior. But he was also fond of performing "practical jests" on the wasps.