by Hugh Raffles
Facedown on the ground, lens in hand, as close as his quarry allows, Fabre permits no detail to escape him, hour after hour, an eager giant spying on a Lilliputian world. Sometimes, anxious for discovery, he goes further, dislodging the nest and prizing it open with his knife. Maybe there’s a lone victim, paralyzed and positioned on its back, a single egg placed on its abdomen just beyond reach of its feebly flickering legs; maybe there are several victims in a cell, stacked on top of one another or arranged front to back, the freshest farthest from the egg.
“Observation sets the problem,” he writes; “experiment solves it.”16 Sometimes he tests the animal in situ. He might wait for the moment when the wasp, descending to check the nest, leaves its captive momentarily unguarded. Swiftly, Fabre purloins the immobilized victim and, breath bated, observes the wasp’s agitation on surfacing. Or he allows the wasp to position her prey in the nest and then enters stealthily, removes the victim, and watches to see if she will nonetheless deposit her egg and seal the entrance as usual (or as he would have it, as predetermined).
Sometimes he carries the nest carefully back to the house. Often, he captures the insect, brings it to his laboratory, and creates controlled and convenient conditions in which to observe its behavior and devise more complex experiments of longer duration. Perhaps, searching for answers in anatomy as well as psychology, he chloroforms and dissects it.
His first dissection was a revelation. It catalyzed his decision to abandon a career teaching mathematics and to make a living from his true passion, natural history. It was 1848. The Second Republic had just been established, and France was in uproar. Fabre was in Corsica, twenty-five years old, teaching physics in the college at Ajaccio and as entranced by the luxuriant landscape (“the infinite, glittering sea at my feet, the dreadful masses of granite overhead”)17 as any Humboldt setting foot in the New World.
He had leaped at the posting, eager to escape Carpentras (“that accursed little hole”).18 Just a few months previously, he had resigned his job as a schoolmaster there, revealing the sense of outrage that would never fully desert him, his hurt at the exclusions that refused to end no matter his achievements. It was the memory of his ejection from school when his parents—Provençal peasants who tried (and failed) to make a living keeping cafés in a series of towns—could not keep up the monthly fees. It was his frustration as a young man laboring on railroad-construction sites, repeatedly passed over for academic postings and denied the opportunity to show his capacities (“The injustice was too unheard-of,” he wrote to his brother, Frédéric, in September 1848, “… to give … [me] two licentiate’s diplomas, and to make … [me] conjugate verbs for a pack of brats!”).19 It was his disappointment at the commercial failure of his decade’s work on a process to extract madder, the red dye used for military uniforms, an enterprise designed to provide him with the income he would need to take up academic employment (which, at the time, was unpaid and intended only for men of means). It was his distress when the clerical backlash against Napoleon III’s educational reforms led to his dismissal from teaching (he had been giving free science classes that were open to girls), throwing his family into poverty and upon the charity of a close friend, the English liberal theorist John Stuart Mill (who had moved to Provence to live and die near the grave of his wife, the early feminist Harriet Taylor).20 It was bitterness that all this misfortune was compounded by the failure of those with power over him to appreciate that his successes (his baccalaureates in letters and mathematics, his degrees in the mathematical and physical sciences, his doctorate in the natural sciences, his more than 200 publications: textbooks as well as volumes of popular science written at a time when the genre scarcely existed; as well as his major scientific discoveries: the first demonstrations of taxis in animals and the proof of hypermetamorphosis in beetles) were won against odds unimaginable by the Parisian scientific elite. It was more bitterness that when recognition finally came, at the end of his long life, the university, the scientists, even the entomologists, rarely paid homage; it was the literary lions—Victor Hugo (who dubbed him the Homer of insects); Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac (who, not to be outdone, anointed him the insects’ Virgil); the playwright Romain Rolland (for whom Fabre was “un des Français que j’admire le plus”); and the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral—who campaigned for Fabre’s nomination for the 1911 Nobel Prize—not for a scientific prize, please note, but for the prize for literature.21 It was his helpless anger at the sudden loss of his eldest son at sixteen and the subsequent deaths of two young daughters and two wives, tragedies that were to cast a pall over his life but tragedies, it must be admitted, from which he himself created a badge of lifelong suffering that became an against-all-odds story of the homespun genius, the poverty-stricken hermitlike poet of science at work in his garden, alone with his insects, simplicity, sacrifice, naïveté in the strict sense, the story that would thrill the Parisian cultural set in his last days and draw them down to the unfamiliar environs of Sérignan.
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
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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.
The victim’s head is still unscathed, the mandibles are at work: they might easily, as the insect is borne along, grip some bit of straw in the ground and successfully resist this forcible removal; the brain, the primary nervous center, might provoke a stubborn contest, which would be very awkward with so heavy a burden. It is well that these hitches be avoided. The caterpillar, therefore, must be reduced to a state of torpor which will deprive him of the least inclination for self-defence. The Ammophila succeeds in this by munching his head. She takes good care not to use her needle: she is no clumsy bungler and knows quite well that to inflict a wound on the cervical ganglia would mean killing the caterpillar then and there, the very thing to be avoided. She merely squeezes the brain between her mandibles, calculating every pinch; and, each time, she stops to ascertain the effect produced, for there is a nice point to be achieved, a certain degree of torpor that must not be exceeded, lest death should intervene. In this way, the requisite lethargy is obtained, a somnolence in which all volition is lost. And now the caterpillar, incapable of resistance, incapable of wishing to resist, is seized by the nape of the neck and dragged to the nest. Comment would mar the eloquence of such facts as these.33
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 s
usceptible 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
With the rise of behaviorism in the 1920s, instinct fell out of favor as an explanation of animal behavior and reemerged only in the 1950s with the popularization of the ethologists, especially Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, who, though Darwinians, enforced a sharp division between instinct and learning. There is a line here that reaches across the decades from Fabre to these more recent students of animal behavior and is held together by simple behavioral experiments in natural settings, by close observation, and by the familiar combination of science and wonder. It’s a line that somehow bypasses Fabre’s hostility to evolution and instead picks up his commitment to popular pedagogy—the impulse to accessibility that led Lorenz, Tinbergen, and their colleague Karl von Frisch to cultivate an eager reading public and capture the Nobel Prize that eluded their predecessor.
It is a line of flight. The wasps fly straight through here, veering off in unanticipated directions, touching down at decisive moments. They flee science to foment Fabrean wonder among the modern creationists, for example, and sometimes they appear in more intriguing places, as in the imagination of the influential philosopher Henri Bergson, a great admirer of Fabre’s (he attended the celebration at l’Harmas organized by Legros in 1910 that heralded the Provençal hermit’s belated journey to the limelight). Bergson listens to the description of the nine-times-stabbing Ammophila surgeon and develops his own idiosyncratic metaphysics of evolution, which draws on Georges Cuvier’s early-nineteenth-century notion that animals, like sleepwalkers, are equipped with a “somnambulist” consciousness (“a kind of consciousness which is intellectually unaware of its purpose”).38
