Introduction to Part III

Introduction

Fear. It is a one-word summary of how a very large number of us view insects. We might want to consider that this is not a wholly irrational perspective.

Insects come to us in our dreams—often in ways that are not compatible with a comfortable night’s sleep. Freud argued that spiders appear in dreams as a result of the unsupervised Id expressing its fear of sex. Of course, with Freud, everything was about sex.

Evolutionary biologists will affirm that fear of insects is probably something that was honed to perfection in humans as a result of natural selection. In other words, ancient people who were afraid of insects would have taken some effort to avoid them and, in so doing, were less likely to be bitten or stung by disease-causing or toxic insects. As a result, they left more offspring and the gene(s) for fearing insects became more common among humans. Similar arguments are made about snakes and heights, adding to the general validity of the idea that these fears have survival value and are of ancient origin. It is no wonder that those genes can’t be automatically turned off in the present.

We are comforted by the experience of a well-known entomologist, Dr. Jeffrey Lockwood. He was one of those people who acquired a love of insects in early childhood leading him to seek a career in his beloved entomology as an adult. He became a professor of entomology. He wrote a well-received book on insect bioterrorism and was generally one of the go-to guys for information about entomology on a national scale. And then he had an experience in the course of doing his research that changed everything. He was out in the field studying locusts and, in a scene that could have been biblical, he was surrounded by thousands of them. He felt like he was being suffocated. He was terrified, overwhelmed and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

It would be one thing if Lockwood’s experience had dissipated with time. In fact, he appeared to have suffered from an insect-based form of PTSD as a result of the locusts. He left the Department of Entomology and sought a new position with a joint appointment in the humanities and science. He no longer has to do research on locusts and appears to be perfectly happy with the decision. Such is the power of insect-based fear.

Our attitudes towards insects have also been driven by the recognition that insects have the potential to wreak havoc on very large geographic and temporal scales. Insect-borne diseases come rapidly to mind. Large scale pandemics are still extremely scary today as our recent experiences with the Ebola and Corona viruses confirms. While the United States has been a nation that prizes science and is particularly proud of the advances of Western medicine, a handful of Ebola cases in the United States in 2014 turned us into fearful recluses who were very willing deprive our own citizens of their civil liberties if they had been in a place where contracting Ebola was even remotely possible. It didn’t matter that representatives of the Centers for Disease Control explained repeatedly and with great patience that there was NO chance that these individuals had Ebola and, furthermore, that all the necessary precautions needed to ensure this had been followed. Policymakers and regular people alike were no longer able to factor logic into their reactions. Fear was running amok. Calls for draconian actions of all sorts abounded even though most of them had no basis of fact. Fortunately people have been less fearful of COVID19, likely because it is much less deadly than Ebola. Unfortunately, however, it is much more transmissible and advice from top public health experts, scientists and doctors have been heavily politicized leaving some people genuinely confused about the risks to public health and the benefits of wearing face masks and washing our hands.

Given our current experience, just imagine what it must have been like in biblical times when the locusts hit. Who wouldn’t be convinced that God Himself was the source behind the travail. Or imagine the fear and suffering of a nation enduring an endless war and the insect-borne diseases that inevitably accompany armed conflict. Lacking an evidence-based explanation of why so many people were dying, who wouldn’t seek a cause in the supernatural realm or place blame with the usual societal suspects: religious groups who were not in favor, women, witches, foreigners . . . pick your scapegoat.

The point is that absent a demonstrable material cause, humans will seek and find something to explain their difficulties. This tendency is exacerbated by fear. The more we fear, the more desperate we are to latch onto a cause—in the vain hope that identifying a cause will suggest a solution. Most of the largescale problems caused by insects are exemplars of this phenomenon as well as its futility. Thus, studying historical examples of insect-borne diseases and insect depredation of crops inform not only our understanding of insects and how they operate but how the human mind works as well. It is a task well worth undertaking as we seek to understand the world and our place in it.

Part III cover photo credit:

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