On Wicked Bugs: A Matter of Diction
So, I was listening to Fresh Air the other day,1 which had a discussion of Amy Stuart’s new book, Wicked Bugs, The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects, which has just been published.
The book is about insects, focusing on the nasty things they do to humans, destroying our stuff, sucking our blood, infecting us with pathogens, and that sort of thing. The book is written in breezy style, and the one review currently on the Amazon page has this remark, which I don’t think is intended as faint praise: “It’s got very nice artwork throughout from Briony Morrow-Cribs and is printed on what feels like good quality paper.”)
So, while I’m sure that the paper is excellent, I want to pause to reflect just a moment on Ms. Stuart’s diction. Stuart is a best selling author, but not a scientist, and this isn’t meant as criticism, but I found it sort of interesting. Let me quote one passage at some length. (I like doing this, in part because it wasn’t that long ago that I discovered the “blockquote” html tag. I still get a kick using it.) All the bold words are my emphasis, not hers, just to highlight what I wanted to discuss. The back story here is that these rootworms lay eggs that sit dormant during the winter, eating the old corn roots when they wake up. To combat these pests, farmers rotated in crops other than corn (e.g., soybeans), disrupting the rootworm lifecycle.
The northern corn rootworm figured out how to outsmart the farmers. It evolved to stretch its winter hibernation over two seasons, effectively realizing that the farmer would plant inedible soybeans for a year but would then return with tasty corn in two years. By laying eggs that could remain dormant through an entire year of soybean planting, and then hatch a year later when the corn returned, it was able to outlast the tried-and-true crop rotation and once again become a serious pest of corn farmers. This adaptation is called “extended diapause.”
To the amazement of entomologists, the western corn rootworm developed a different way to survive that was just as ingenious as its northern counterpart. Rather than sleep through the soybean rotation, it adapted by laying eggs whose larvae didn’t mind eating soybeans.
My interest was piqued on this issue because on the NPR transcript, Stuart uses the word “developed” when it seems that she’s really talking about selection, as in, the female of a particular species “developed” such and such a defense against the males. In the context she’s using the word, she’s not talking about development (ontogeny), but rather evolution by natural selection. She does it multiple times, which caught my attention.
This is what led me to look at the original text in the book. Again, she’s not a scientist, so I don’t think it’s that big a deal, but it’s hard not to notice the intentional language here, with the worms “figuring out” and “realizing.” It seems clear that what she means is really an explanation located in selection. There were mutations, and selection favored eggs that could remain dormant longer, and these genes were selected by virtue of this phenotypic effect…
Now, of course we use this sort of language all the time, and Dawkins bends over backwards to clarify that when he uses this sort of language, as in “selfish” genes, this can always be paid out in the language of selection.
It’s particularly interesting because it’s not like she’s afraid of using the a-word (adaptation) or the e-word (evolved), since she uses them both right there on the same page. When I first read the transcript, I thought maybe she was shy about using these words, which she might perceive as loaded and controversial.
It could be something trivial, a reluctance to used the same word more than once in a small space. Some authors have a reluctance to use the same word or phrase in nearby sentences. (See what I did there?) Or it could be that the notion of the bugs doing some outsmarting or figuring simply is useful as a device that keeps with the trope of the work, which is that diabolical insects are out to get us in all sorts of ways.
My guess is that it’s seductive to use the intentional stance, as Dennett would say, to think about these things, and, at least in books like this one, doing so isn’t all that big a deal. (That is, critics aren’t likely to blast her for the way she’s using these words.) Still, I can’t help feeling that when she knew she was on the air, she stayed away from the e-word (not to mention the a-word). But who knows?
In any case, I was thinking of getting a copy for my Kindle, but it seems a shame to miss out on the high quality paper.
1Actually, I wasn’t. But my sweetie was, and brought this to my attention.