Ah, summer. Long days, cools nights, delightful picnics, and bugs. The world’s most annoying creatures. They’re not even cute. And for a number of reasons, bugs are weird. That may be their only redeeming feature. Ask any kid, or sci-fi aficionado, or horror-movie producer, bugs are scary- strange—too many eyes, too many legs, sometimes furry, sometimes sleek and enameled (sometimes both, in different places), flying, leaping, trundling, always chewing or chirping or buzzing. Many don’t even retain anywhere near the same shape throughout their lives (where is their concept of self if you start out without legs, say, or wings, then suddenly sprout these things as if it were the easiest thing in the world? Do they remember the flying phase but not the squirming one? Or, retaining both, are they necessarily schizophrenic? Most start benign and morph into nightmares. I mean, mosquitoes are perfectly fine in their aquatic phase: natural fish food. But once they get their wings, they cross the line into total nuisance. And with bugs in general (and mosquitoes in particular) there is never just one of them at a time; unlike the stately elk on a ridgeline and the osprey on a branch who have the supreme good sense to pose, solitary and distant, for all to see, bugs come in thousands or tens of thousands or more (one termite colony in Louisiana housed an estimated 60 million termites—which is a good reason to carefully consider any move to that state) and shamefully congregate where you don’t see them or don’t want to see them.
Happily for those of us in temperate climes, bugs don’t like winter. In fact, most perish in even fairly mild cold. There are spectacular exceptions– the alpine weta (imagine a large flightless grasshopper) in New Zealand, for example. Normally it creeps about foraging and no one pays any attention to it until winter when everyone starts noticing— this weta freezes solid, hunkered down in the Rock and Pillar Range of the South Island. Scientists build little fences around their habitats so cross-country skiers won’t disturb the various studies going on.
Yet some of the problems bugs pose are interesting; should we eat them as opposed to simply using them as bait for things we like to eat better, like trout? (yes, especially since many of them would gladly eat us) Could we have apples or delicata squash or cotton socks without them? (no, nor a great many other things we cherish, ungratefully) are they very very old? (of course) will they survive without us? (most will). But we don’t always think about them with such detachment, let alone appreciation. I know people (e.g. me) who will delicately avoid stepping on a wildflower but unleash a can of industrial strength insecticide on a wasp nest without batting an eye. There’s something. . . if not exactly icky, at least alien about bugs that disarms our solidarity as living species. Here’s W. H. Auden in his “The Aliens” (written for his god-son who was, presumably, just as interested in bugs as any boy): after pointing out that we revere plants (which seem so diligent and hardworking) and feel such kinship with animals that “in our folk-tales,/ toads and squirrels can talk, in our epics the great be compared to lions or foxes or eagles. // But between us and the Insects,/ namely nine-tenths of the living, there grins a prohibitive fracture/ empathy cannot transgress. (What Saint made a friend of a roach or/preached to an ant-hill?)”
His explanation is that the insects were caught up in an earlier Fall after a crab-like Adam (“who’d just wriggled out of a steamy ocean where he had failed to make a living”) ceded control of his ganglia to seducing Archon in return for what passes as immortality-by-numbers. The general drift is that because we cannot imagine bugs to experience empathy (especially since they look vaguely mechanical AND have irregular breeding habits, to say the least), they forfeit claims to our sympathy. You’ll never hear anyone say “Don’t kill those cockroaches under the sink! They look so cute!” Even the daily trials of Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s man-into insect elicit greater disgust than sympathy.
Species-profiling has a long and storied past, but none better to illustrate our seeming innate human distaste for bugs than Darwin. Darwin saw in a particular (and particularly nasty) species of wasp a profound moral conundrum. This wasp deposits its eggs beside a certain caterpillar it has just stung and stunned so that the growing larvae can slowly consume their host bit by bit, keeping it alive precisely long enough for them to mature. In a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin expressed his doubts in Providential Design based on the habits of this wasp: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars…” This was, for him, the smoking gun of non-Intelligent design. I think it tells us more about Darwin himself than he intended to that he uses this example to question the existence of Providence. Even had he known about Black Holes and their extraordinary, pitiless violence, my guess is that Darwin would have pinned his case on a insect. Nasty ol’ bugs give us a glimpse of the amoral universe— probably because we already think them entirely capable of the most heartless evils.
But Darwin’s well-known quip about Providence and the Ichneumon wasp itself underwent a curious evolution. He first met and meditated on this icon of cruelty in Brazil aboard the Beagle around 1832, and became familiar with its peculiar method of providing for its young—and reasoned that because the adult wasp simply deposits the stunned prey in the same hole as it lays its eggs, whatever information is transmitted in this process cannot be called intentional: parent does not know it is providing food, nor do the larvae know there was any benevolent parent on whom it should model itself. This blind (and incidentally predatory) behavior, repeated over and over through the generations, perfectly describes the mechanical process of natural selection. The wasp example came up again in 1859 as merely an example of ‘mindless’ nature. There was no specific mention of the moral qualities of this method of providing for one’s offspring (after all, it seems pretty well suited if you’re a wasp. . . not so much if you’re a caterpillar. . . who’s to judge?) Most commentators connect Darwin’s loss of faith not to the Ichneumon who takes the rap but to the death of Darwin’s young daughter Annie in 1841—which, incidentally, provides a far less quaint bit of evidence than a hungry larva for the question of God’s oversight.
Happily, it seems that by the late 1870s Darwin patched up his feud with bugs— or with worms, at least, for whom he formed a curious affection strong enough that he gave over his living room and study to glass vessels filled with triturating worms. For years he observed their reactions to light (no deterrent to their sex instinct), odor (they prefer raw carrot over tobacco), and piano concertos (no preferred composer). Where would we be without worms, who actually seem to ‘enjoy’ (Darwin’s phrase) eating? With a degree of precision we mortals cannot but admire, he calculated there were 53,767 worms per acre on his farm, each busily contributing to the fecundity of the soil for our benefit. And while remaining fiercely agnostic despite the charm of worms and the natural beauty of his country estate at Downe, he took pains to point out that for the rest of us, belief in evolution was not irreconcilable with faith in God.
