Insectopedia (19 page)

A fly was born. A novel animal, so long as it could be prevented from combining with its nonstandard relatives. The researchers sought parental material in the most desirable mutants, the ones that were robust, keen to mate, fecund, and easily distinguishable from those other
Drosophila
buzzing busily beyond the Fly Room. These were also, Morgan noted, the ones that were “free from such bad habits as getting drowned, or stuck in the food, or refusing to be emptied from the culture bottle, etc., which alienate the affections of the experimenter.”
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The new fly was cooperative, amenable to experiment, attuned to the
production of precise, numerical data. Unlike its increasingly distant cousins outside the lab, who took to the air only at dawn and dusk, it was active all day long and bred around the clock. It was mass-produced to produce experiments in mass. By the best estimates, in creating the genetic map of the standard fly between 1919 and 1923, Morgan and his colleagues “etherized, examined, sorted, and processed” between 13 million and 20 million of them.
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And in the midst of such attention to numbers, the enormous imprecision of that figure says as much about the animal’s status as does the enormous figure itself.

You might argue that by entering the laboratory, the fruit fly guaranteed itself a life of ease and plenty. No more foraging for food or dodging predators, no more vulnerable larvae. Up to that moment, along with dogs, rats, cockroaches, and a few other household familiars, the fly had been an opportunist, a companion animal sharing human history, finding a home alongside and among us, neither fully wild nor truly domesticated (
commensal
might be a good term), eating where we ate, thriving where we thrived, and no doubt surviving where we failed.

But laboratory life isn’t much of a bargain. Countless billions of
Drosophila
have been subjected to induced mutations since Morgan’s day. As Cornelia Hesse-Honegger witnessed, they grow too many body parts—or too few—and they grow them in the wrong shapes and in the wrong places (legs from their eyes, legs from their legs—you know how it goes). With a little help, they develop Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases. They experience sleep and memory disorders. They get addicted to ethanol, nicotine, and cocaine. In short, as Cornelia realized, they not only bear the burden of our dreams of health and longevity, but they also assume the task of living out our nightmares.

As the industrial fruit fly became more standardized, as it changed and grew apart from its unfettered cousins, and as—at the same time—it became more and more a product of the Columbia Fly Room, Morgan and the drosophilists came increasingly to admire and respect it, to regard it, as did the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, as a “noble animal.” Considering how much of themselves they’d put into creating it, how much time they were spending in its company, and how closely it was collaborating in their work, it isn’t surprising that they personified the fly. But still, this intimate bundling of admiration and slaughter is telling and a little strange too, until one thinks of the ways in which nobility is often twinned with sacrifice and how all of them—flies and fly people—had embarked on a great voyage, the kind of scientific voyage of discovery that often includes suffering and self-sacrifice as integral components of its narrative.
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Maybe the limits of this little strangeness can help us understand a bigger strangeness too: how this fly can be so like us that it seems natural to think of it as our biological surrogate and simultaneously can be so entirely unlike us that it seems equally natural to subject it, without remorse or even concern, to unconstrained destruction.
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Those images of the fighters are disconcerting. So far from Shanghai, so unexpected, flies not crickets, such a blunt instrument, thrust into a culture of no culture, caught on video, losing their heads. In Shanghai,
the lines are clear: there’s ambiguity and attachment but no confusion. In San Diego, too, the lines are drawn, and there’s also no confusion. But there’s no ambiguity either. In San Diego, similarity is quantifiable. Even if the numbers aren’t entirely solid yet, the facts still count: humans and fruit flies share many of the same genes; we share metabolic and signaling pathways at the cellular level, and, many neuroscientists are willing to argue, we overlap substantially in behavior and (what the scientists contend are) its molecular mechanisms.
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There are few niceties here. Animal experiments are blunt instruments, and the logic of the model organism is to separate body and soul, biology and consciousness, physics and metaphysics. It’s easy when similarity and difference are not ranged on the same scale, when the basis for judging one is not the same as that for judging the other, when the criteria of similarity are genetic and the criteria of difference do not even require articulating: they are ancient, Aristotelian, now commonsensical, obvious, tedious to enumerate. Let’s say only that these are insects, that their difference—and what it allows—is not in question. Elias Canetti understood this. Insects, he wrote, “are outlaws”:

Annemarie Mol, the Dutch philosopher and anthropologist, has studied the social life of atherosclerosis, a disease that narrows the arteries and inhibits circulation, first in the legs and eventually in the heart. Mol is an acute observer. She attends autopsies on atherosclerosis patients, many of whom died under hospital care. She notices that as the pathologists slice through the heavy flesh to enter the circulatory system, they often take a moment to cover the corpse’s face with a piece of cloth.
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Mol considers this gesture and concludes that there are in fact two corpses—one body but two beings. One being, the body being sliced, is the biological body, the scientific body, freed of the metaphysics of humanity and free to be dissected as a piece of meat, anonymous. The second being, the body being sliced, is the social body, a body with history,
family, and friends, a body that has loved and suffered and demands modesty, respect, and attention. Mol’s point is not to choose which of these bodies is lying on the autopsy table but to show that both bodies are present and that the simple gesture with the cloth—the covering of the face—is also a simple gesture of recognition.

Maybe for now that cloth can also mark the difference between the fighting crickets of Shanghai and the fighting flies of San Diego. Maybe the difference is ontological. In Shanghai, each cricket is many crickets, many beings with many histories and many friends are compressed into its limber frame. Around it, many dreams unfold, many projects rise and fall. If they are warriors, so are we. In San Diego, there is only the scientific fly, “an instrument, a living analogue of microscopes, galvanometers, [and] analytical reagents” whose purpose is clear, whose role is defined, whose death is not at issue, whose life is not at stake.

The most beautiful images of insects I have ever seen are in
Ignis
, the first volume of Joris Hoefnagel’s natural history masterpiece
The Four Elements
, a compendium of the world’s animals that this great Flemish miniaturist completed in 1582.
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Painted in delicate but still-vibrant gouache on seventy-eight vellum pages only five and five eighth inches high by seven and one quarter inches wide, many of Hoefnagel’s insects sit poised, on the point of motion, as if holding their breath, their shadows appearing almost to flicker on the featureless white ground. Others fly within the simple gold border that bounds them like a magic circle. Still others, spiders, dangle from the frame. Sometimes they seem to acknowledge one another, sometimes not. Sometimes they touch, most often not. Sometimes they seem so close, so
present
in the viewer’s time and space, that as the pages fell open in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where Greg Jecmen, curator of old master prints and drawings, was showing me the precious volume, I caught my breath in involuntary wonder.

It felt odd to be surprised like that. For just a second, I let myself fancy that mine was the same sharp gasp as that of Hoefnagel’s sixteenth-century viewer, someone for whom (it is likely) insects were lowly and loathsome, still buried at the foot of an Aristotelian natural order that held them firmly in the thick darkness of excrement and decay, unworthy of contemplation, until—and surely this was Hoefnagel’s intent—the page fell back to reveal their astonishing perfection.

“In minimis tota es.”
That’s how the London physician Thomas Moffett puts it in his
Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum
, an encyclopedic study of insect life and lore conceived and written in the same years as
The Four Elements
, although not published until 1634.
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Moffett’s insects are exemplary in many large ways. They are industrious; they are thrifty; they demonstrate good governance, respect for the elderly, and devotion to their offspring. Their metamorphosis is a resurrection, not merely a transformation. Their wondrousness stimulates piety. Their tiny perfection leads us to cry out, “How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!”
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The
Theatrum
was the second great compendium devoted to insects. The first was
De animalibus insectis libri septem
, published in 1602 by the prominent Bolognese naturalist and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi, a volume of such authority and ambition that it opened the door through which insects would eventually find their way into academic natural history.
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Both texts followed in the wake of
Ignis
, making Hoefnagel’s not only “one of the founding monuments of entomology” but also the first book of any type devoted to insects “as a separate kingdom rather than [as] a group appended to other major classes of animals.”
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All three
books formed part of a continent-spanning project of early-modern natural history, a project fueled and provisioned by New World exploration and the expansion of maritime and overland trade. Far-reaching networks of correspondence and perilous travel linked scholars, merchants, and patrons—often with overlapping functions—to Prague, Frankfurt, Rome, and other centers of late-Renaissance learning.

It wasn’t only self-justification that provoked Moffett’s insistence that the greatest was contained even in the meanest. He was also appealing to a widely held Platonistic cosmology, in which the relationship between small and large was conceived as that between microcosm and macrocosm, with each being containing within it a seed of the entire cosmos.
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How well this notion lent itself to the study of insects! Their miniature world astonished not simply by the scale of its infinitely intricate social, biological, and symbolic life but, above all, by the contrast between the density of activity and meaning compressed into such physical tininess and the vastness of the cosmos to which it so unerringly but so mysteriously corresponded. Where better to locate the structure of the cosmos than in its most compact form? Given that the paradoxical was often a defining trait of the wondrous, Moffett could convincingly argue that the miniature was saturated by the immensity of the Divine to an even greater extent than were nature’s more conspicuous phenomena. Such micro/macrocosmic reasoning was so well established in the humanist circles to which these naturalists belonged that it was even the principle on which Hoefnagel’s final patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, organized his Prague cabinet of curiosities, the greatest
Kunstkammer
in Europe and the eventual home of
The Four Elements.
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