For Love of Insects Book

Thomas Eisner, whose March 27, 2011 Cornell Chronicle obituary described him as "a world-renowned authority on animal behavior, chemical ecology and evolution, and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Chemical Ecology at Cornell," died in Ithaca, New York, U.S.A., in 2011 at age 81.

This volume, published in 2003 is a scientific and experimental memoir of sorts, lucid, engaging and generous - at least to his human colleagues: his wife, research associates, and graduate students in particular.

Physiology is a bloody business, I suppose, and though I was at once attracted to For Love of Insects by its jacket blurbs (Diane Ackerman, Paul Ehrlich, Oliver Sacks) and its forward (by E.O. Wilson, a friend and contemporary of Eisner), I was just as quickly put off by what many reviewers have heralded as Eisner's astounding photo and micrographs: isolated and half dissected body parts, animals attached to wires, animals poked and prodded, squeezed with forceps, etc. I thought of Damon Knight's ironic title To Serve Man when I thought of Eisner's (or his editors') title For Love of Insects. I thought of how much human biology and psychology we might now have access to if only we were still entirely free to experiment with human subjects at will.

But such seems to be the history of Natural Science: our exclusions simultaneously work their way down from the great apes and the cetaceans and up from the 'lower races'. We learn, as little boys do, by smashing things and pulling legs off. And perhaps, in some enlightened future, a future perhaps granted by this very violence, we will come to some redemptive balance, fully appreciating and intellectually appropriating but also fully repenting of our previous decimations: of chance individuals populations, of communities, cultures, languages, civilizations, species, ecosystems, landscapes, etc.

In the conclusion to his sixth chapter, Tales from the Website, a fascinating segment on spiders (not properly insects, as many leapt to note), Eisner writes "Quite aside from the issue of consciousness, we came to the conclusion that invertebrates perceive pain, and that their sensory basis for doing so may not be much different from our own. There is therefore good reason for treating invertebrates humanely." This conclusion was derived from inducing - over and over and over again - via various venoms, what was, in the end, judged to be apparent substantial pain, substantial enough, in this instance, for the (many) spiders to "autotomize" (that is, to shed) their affected limbs. Two pages earlier Eisner wrote: "We were particularly eager to test the notion in an experimental situation that made sense in terms of the real world - a situation where an invertebrate was exposed, in a natural context, to experiences known to be painful to humans." (I.e. the injection of a venom, as per bee, snake, or scorpion stings.)

Sadly, the volume is full of what might be, in those terms, inhumanity. Animals are tethered, starved, dissected, have their wings removed and replaced (with Elmer's Glue) with wings of other species, etc., etc. Statements like "The Neopyrochroa males that came to the traps…were cantharidin-free… We determined this by chemical analysis…" are commonplace. (If I am not mistaken, this presumably entails grinding up a fair number of those trapped Neopyrochroa and chemically analyzing the slurry.)

I assure you I am neither surprised nor shocked by this; I have read enough to know how Natural Science often proceeds. And indeed, I have had the requisite 'realist' discussions concerning how the carrot might view its harvest. And I also realize that there are substantial aspects of the life I enjoy that flow from the suffering of "others" - most of it, one could argue. But still I am saddened, and unapologetically so. This may be my comfort, my health and my wealth, but it is not love, in any sense I know, beyond, I would venture, fascination and obsession. It is, rather, a vision of some weird inverted karmic hell.

Nonetheless (as these reviews seem often to conclude) the volume offers a remarkable and coherent window on the actuality we regularly stride past (and upon): its still incomprehensible complexity, its alien beauty, its bug-eat-bug savagery, and, in this particular treatment of what still passes for our high science, our own special cruelty.

Rest in peace, Dr. Eisner.