Insectopedia (9 page)

It was a raw anger that fueled a vigorous populism. Addressing an imagined audience of elite scientists, the men who had responded to his antagonism to evolutionary theory by removing his textbooks from classrooms and once more plunging him into grim poverty, he articulates a passion so consuming that it temporarily absolves the cicadas: “You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a torture chamber and dissecting room, I make my observations under the blue sky to the song of the Cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life.”
²²
He meant, of course, that he studied the living animal, the animal in its true form, as God intended it to be known, a being of spirit, mystery, and definite purpose, a being accessible through experience not theory, through intimacy not abstraction.

But he was, as we already know, not averse to prying into death, and indeed, according to his friend and biographer, the doctor-politician Georges Victor Legros, it was with that first dissection, in Ajaccio, that his story began. In Corsica, he had befriended Alfred Moquin-Tandon, a professor of botany at Toulouse, a man of letters twenty years his senior who wrote poetry in vernacular Provençal and talked of the importance of an accomplished style, even in the writing of biology. Over dinner, Moquin-Tandon, improvising instruments from his sewing basket, dissected a snail. “From that time forward,” wrote Legros, Fabre “began to collect not only dead, inert, or desiccated forms, mere material for study, with the aim of satisfying his curiosity; he began to dissect with ardor, a thing he had never done before. He housed his tiny guests in his cupboard; and occupied himself, as he was always to do in the future, with
the smaller living creatures only.” Soon after, Fabre wrote Frédéric from Corsica, “My scalpels are tiny daggers which I make myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a saucer; my prisoners are lodged by the dozen in old match-boxes;
maxime miranda in minimis.
”
²³

Maxime miranda in minimis.
Of the many tiny marvels he would encounter over the succeeding decades, the most miraculous were the hunting wasps. Some of what they revealed to him was already known, but some was entirely new. Not even the illustrious René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur—the pioneer of entomological observation who described the
Odynerus
wasp at length in his six-volume
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes
(1734–42)—knew that instead of laying their egg directly on the “swarming heap” of two dozen captive weevil larvae, the
Odynerus
(and the
Eumenes
) suspend it from a fine thread attached to the domed roof of the nest.
²⁴
After years of trying to engineer the opportunity, Fabre was finally a witness. It was, he confessed, “one of those moments of inward joy which atone for much vexation and weariness.” The hatched wasp larva lowers itself to feed (“head downwards, it is digging into the limp belly of one of the caterpillars”), and then—when its meal becomes too agitated—it hoists itself safely out of reach.
²⁵

Each of his insects confirmed the power of instinct. It might seem, he said, as if these animals know what they’re doing. It might appear as if their astonishing behavior is an exterior manifestation of an interior life. But that would be entirely wrong. They act without consciousness and without self-knowledge. They follow instincts they have possessed since the Creation, instincts that are blind, rigid, and innate, that are not learned but are instead possessed fully formed from birth, perfect and infallible, highly specialized to their function and peculiar to each species. These instincts possess “wisdom”: they generate flawless behavior that solves the most complex problems of physical existence. Yet under the stress of experimental disruption, they prove themselves completely “ignorant,” unresponsive to the simplest changes in familiar conditions.
²⁶

Over and over he told this story, believing—as many creationists still do—that in instinct he had found evolution’s Achilles’ heel, proof that species are fixed and immutable and have been so since the beginning. Because—and his argument is quite this simple—how could intermediary stages exist for such extraordinarily complex and precisely calibrated behavior? Think of the hunting wasps, he says; it’s a zero-sum game: “The art of preparing the larva’s provisions allows of none but masters and suffers no apprentices.”
²⁷
If the prey isn’t adequately immobilized, he says, it will destroy the egg or the larva; if the prey is so badly wounded that it dies, the egg will hatch but the larva’s food source will putrefy and the hatchling will starve. What animal genius enables the delicate calculation by which, time after time, the prey is rendered insensate but with all vital functions intact? As he watches the hairy
Ammophila
paralyze its victim, he faces life’s most profound truth, the mystery of mysteries, before which even grown men of science can only weep: “Animals obey their compelling instinct, without realizing what they do. But whence comes that sublime inspiration? Can theories of atavism, of natural selection, of the struggle for life interpret it reasonably? To me and my friend, this was and remained one of the most eloquent revelations of the unutterable logic that rules the world and guides the ignorant by the laws of its inspiration. Stirred to our innermost being by the flash of truth, both of us felt tears of undefinable emotion spring to our eyes.”
²⁸

Any of his insects could bring him here. But it was the wasps, he believed, that presented the most forceful case against the Darwinian view that instincts are inherited adaptive behaviors; that, as Darwin put it in 1871 in
The Descent of Man
, complex instincts are gained “through the natural selection of variations of simpler instinctive actions,” and “those insects which possess the most wonderful instincts are certainly the most intelligent.” Darwin’s instincts were, of course, inherited, and they were far from fixed and far from perfect. They were adaptive, not prescient. As he summarized it, “intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited.”
²⁹

It was against these heresies that Fabre marshaled the wasps. And it was the wasps that gave him license to state categorically, “I reject the modern theory of instinct.” “Modern theory,” his disparaging term for
evolution, was “an ingenious game in which the arm-chair naturalist, the man who shapes the world according to his whim, is able to take delight, but in which the observer, the man grappling with reality, fails to find a serious explanation of anything whatsoever that he sees.”
³⁰

The hairy
Ammophila
chooses for her prey the larva of the lepidopteran
Agrotis segetum
, a creature up to fifteen times her weight. Fabre’s description of the struggle between the tiny wasp and the large “gray worm” is one of his most famous. “Never,” he wrote, “did the intuitive science of instinct show me anything more exciting.”

He is walking with his friend close to home when they catch sight of the agitated
Ammophila.
The two men “at once lay down on the ground, close to where she was working,” so close, in fact, that—in a typically Doctor Dolittle detail—the wasp briefly settles on Fabre’s sleeve.
³¹
They watch as she scours a narrow patch of ground, evidently on the track of her prey. Ill-advisedly, the larva surfaces. “The huntress was on the spot at once, gripping him by the skin of his neck and holding tight in spite of his contortions. Perched on the monster’s back, the Wasp bent her abdomen and deliberately, without hurrying, like a surgeon thoroughly acquainted with his patient’s anatomy, drove her lancet into the ventral surface of each of the victim’s segments, from the first to the last. Not a ring was left without receiving a stab; all, whether with legs or without, were dealt with in order, from front to back.”
³²

Note the key observation: the wasp delivers nine stings, each injected at a precise point in a different segment of the caterpillar’s body. And note also that the stings are delivered in sequence. Fabre’s subsequent dissection seems to prove the wasp’s foresight. These are surgical strikes, each taking out one of the caterpillar’s motor ganglia. But the best is to come.

In a classic paper first published in 1972, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein (now remembered less fondly as co-author of
The Bell Curve
), located Fabre as a major figure in the “intuitional approach to instinct,” a position Herrnstein neatly summarized as “a set of denials held together by a sense of awe.”
³⁴

In this late-nineteenth–early-twentieth-century post-Darwinian moment of intense debate about the nature and origins of human and animal behavior, instinct was a central, much-contested philosophical and empirical concept. The intuitional position—with its idea of instinct as a special and undefined “capacity for adaptation”
³⁵
distinct from intelligence—was only one of several key poles. Herrnstein identified three and contrasted Fabre’s account with what he called the “reflexive view,” which brought together such diverse figures as Herbert Spencer, the behaviorists Jacques Loeb and (in his early work) John B. Watson, and the psychologist-philosopher William James, who was quite clear on the distinction between his own position and that of a Fabre: “The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words … [that] smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals—so superior to anything in man—and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God’s beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and, turning our attention to
this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life.”
³⁶
In this intuitional account, says James, instincts are little more than complex, differentiated reflexes (“compound reflex action” was Spencer’s famous phrase).

Herrnstein’s third position, which, like the reflexive view, assumed that instincts are subject to selective pressures in ways similar to morphological traits, was termed hormic (as in hormonal) psychology by William McDougall, its main proponent. According to McDougall, instincts are highly malleable and susceptible to environmental influence but organized around a stable core, which is driven by a striving toward a defined outcome (the building of a nest, the imprisoning of prey, and so on) and is the impulse behind almost all human and animal behavior. Instincts, wrote McDougall, are “the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies.”
³⁷