What Might Have Been The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking Book

This is my second Fabre book, although the distinction might be rather artificial; as I understand it, all of his “books” are just judicious selections from his enormous Souvenirs Entomologiques. The entries in this one suit the title’s theme, instinct, quite wonderfully. Fabre, in his usual poetic form, really makes his subjects shine. Any non-entomothusiasts must find themselves rather surprised to care so much about these seemingly simple creatures.

Foremost, one learns that they aren't nearly so simple after all. This is the only time I've ever been hesitant to spoil the surprises in a non-fiction book; I’ll bite the bullet, and hopefully no one will mind if I spoil just one. Did you know that many bees and wasps can determine the sex of their offspring at will? Even to the extent of laying only males or only females? Doubly as impressive, they do it right at the precipice of the laying. Apparently, they decide at a moment’s notice which sex is more appropriate given the environmental conditions at hand.

The means Fabre employs to discover this fact are ingenious, not to mention observant to the point of obstinacy. As best as my limited education and access to Wikipedia can determine, his results seem to be corroborated today, and explained as a quirk of some haplodiploidy based organisms. I’m not sure how much of that sort of thing was understood by the time of this book; so far I've been unable to find a date for this specific selection. Regardless, it’s an impressive discovery.

All throughout, Fabre frequently manages to find some humbling parallel between the lives/habits of his insects and the lives/habits of his fellow humans. In politics and sociology, he seems entirely uncritical of ideas I naively imagined to be modern. Perhaps the utterly alien behaviors of his cohort familiarized him with other ways one might coexist with one’s neighbors. I can’t say I know much about 19th century France, but it seems implausible that Fabre should be representative of his peers from that time and place. In other words, he should get more recognition than he has to date.