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>> Thank you so much for coming today. I'm pleased to have with us Hugh Raffles this
afternoon. Hugh is a professor and Chair of Anthropology
at The New School. And he's also the author of In Amazonia: A
Natural History for which he received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic
Writing. And his work in general addresses human concepts
of nature and the relationship between humans, animals, and
other non-humans. And his most recent book is Insectopedia,
which a collection of 26 chapters one for each letter of the alphabet
in which he considers insects and our cultural relation to them.
Moving from cricket fighting in China to dances with bees from insects
at 15,000 feet to fighting fruit flies. He's written a very engaging exploration of
our relationship to the physical world.
So please join me in welcoming Hugh Raffles.
[APPLAUSE]
Hugh Raffles: Thanks. Thanks very much, Simon.
It's great to be here. I'm very happy to be inside Google.
It's really an interesting experience and thank you very much for
bringing me here. What I'm going to do is talk a little bit
about the book, tell you a little bit about it.
Then I'm going to read some -- a few sections and then hopefully we'll
have time for some conversation afterwards. So, um, as Simon said, this is a book about
-- a book about insects and about human relationships to insects.
And it's very wide-ranging. It covers -- it's historical.
It goes back to the 15th century and before. There's actually some -- it actually takes
us back to Aristotle in the Western tradition.
But it also is based around -- it also has quite a bit about field work
which I've done in different places. I'm an anthropologist and I like to travel
and meet people in a whole range the places.
Then that's represented in the book.
[pause]
And as I said I'm an anthropologist but I'm not an entomologist.
And when I started working on the book, I actually didn't know very
much about insects at all. I didn't pay them a lot of attention except
when they forced their way into my life as they're inclined to do in
New York apartments, which is what I live in.
And I certainly didn't understand them. They seemed completely mysterious, apart from
mosquitoes I didn't really have much of an idea of even what they
wanted. But insects are fascinating.
And they took me over. The more time I spent studying them, the more
-- the more interested I got in them.
They're powerful; they're dangerous; they're beautiful; mysterious;
they're difficult and much more. And I discovered they're often at the center
of very fascinating worlds.
Worlds that wouldn't exist without them. An insect collector that I met in Tokyo, a
man called Daisaburo Okumoto, told me that insect lovers are anarchists.
And I think that he meant that he loved these impossible, unmanageable
creature because they're impossible and unmanageable not despite the
fact that they are. And I learned a lot from spending time with
people like him who'd thought deeply about insects and about their
place in our lives. Insects live in a completely different world
from us. And it's one that we pay very little attention
to, but if we do start to look, to listen, and to shift our sense
of scale, as many of the people that I write about do, we enter a universe
that can dramatically enrich the one that most of us normally occupy.
And that's -- that's the theme that this book starts with.
It describes how scientists in the 1920s tried to find out something
about the lives of insects who were invading cotton crops in the U.S.
South. They sent up planes to see if they could
-- to see what they could find out about insect migration.
And as I'll try to describe in this passage, they found a lot more than
they bargained for.
[READING] "There are only a few flies and wasps in that
first trap at Tallulah, but over the next five years, the researchers
flew more than 1300 sorties from the Louisiana airstrip and they
captured tens of thousands more insects in altitudes ranging from 20
to 15,000 feet. They generated a long series of charts and
tables, cataloging individual insects as 700-named species, according
to the height at which they were collected, the time of day,
the wind speed and direction, the temperature, barometric pressure,
humidity, dew point, and many other physical variables.
They already knew something about long distance dispersal.
They'd heard about butterflies and gnats, water striders, leaf bugs,
booklice and katydids sighted hundreds of miles out on the open ocean.
About the aphids that Captain William Perry had encountered on ice
flows during his polar expedition of 1828, and about those other aphids
that in 1925 made the 800-mile journey cross the frigid, wind-swept
Bering Sea in just 24 hours. Still, they were taken aback by the enormous
quantities of animals they were discovering in the air above Louisiana
and unashamedly astonished by the heights at which they found them.
All of a sudden, it seems, the heavens had opened.
They estimated that at any given time of day on any given day
throughout the year, the air column rising from 50 to 14,000 feet above
one square mile of Louisiana countryside contained an average of 25
million insects and perhaps as many as 36 million.
They found ladybugs at 6,000 feet during the daytime; striped cucumber
beetles at 3,000 feet during the night. They collected 3 scorpion flies at 5,000 feet;
31 fruit flies between 200 and 3,000; a fungus gnat at 7,000 feet,
another at 10,000. They trapped an anthrax-transmitting horsefly
at 200 feet and another at 1,000.
They caught wingless worker ants as high as 4,000 feet.
And 16 species of parasitic wasps at altitudes of up to 5,000 feet.
At 15,000 feet, probably the highest elevation at which any specimen
has ever been taken above the surface of the earth, they wrote, they
trapped a ballooning spider. A feat that reminded them that spiders are
thought to have navigated the globe on the trade winds and led one of
them to write that the younger-most spiders are more or less addicted
to this mode of transportation.
An image of excited little animals packing their luggage that opened a
small eruption on the consensus around the passivity of all this
airborne movement. And led to a subsequent observation that ballooning
spiders not only climb up to an exposed site -- a tree, twig,
or flower, for instance, stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test
the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments and launch themselves into
a balloon or free, like spread eagle, but that they also use their
bodies and their silk to control their decent and the location of their
landing. 36 million little animals flying unseen above
one square mile of countryside.
The heavens opened. The air column was a vault of insect-laden
air from which fell a continuous rain.
So stop, if you're inside, go to a window, throw it open and turn your
face to the sky. All that empty space, the deep vastness of
the air, the heavens wide above you, the sky is full of insects and
all of them are going somewhere.
Every day above and around us, their collective voyage of billions of
beings." Well, that's -- that's sense of -- sort of
sense of mystery about there being worlds around us that we're not --
that we're not at all familiar with is one of the themes that continues through
the book. But quite a lot of the book, as I said, is
based field research that I've done in various places.
And I spent a few of the most enjoyable weeks that I had in writing in
book in Shanghai. And one of my chapters -- one of the chapters
in here is about people there who train and fight crickets and people
who have a deep knowledge about crickets.
Cricket fighting in China has a history that goes back nearly a
thousand years and I go on to some detail about this in the book.
And the part that I want to read you describes some of what I learned
from a very experienced cricket trainer that I met there, a man called
Master Fung, who was the director of a cricket museum in Qi Bao which
is a suburb of Shanghai. [Reading]
"All these crickets were collected here in Qi Bao, says Master Fung.
Standing behind a table laden with hundreds of great clay pots, each
containing one fighting male, and in some cases, its female sex
partner. Qi Bao's crickets are famous throughout East
Asia, he tells us, a product of the township's rich soil.
But since the fields here were built on in the year 2000, crickets have
been harder to find. Master Fung's two white-uniformed assistants
fill the insect's miniature water bottles with pipettes and
we humans all drink pleasantly a stringent tea made from his recipe
of seven medicinal herbs.
Master Fung's considerable presence, the prim of his white canvas hat
rakishly angled, his jade pendant and rings, his intense gaze, his
animated storytelling, his throaty laugh. Michael, my translator, and I are drawn to
him immediately and hang on his words.
Master Fung is a cricket master, confides his assistant Miss Jao.
He has 40-years' experience. There is no one more [INAUDIBLE, knowledgeable
about] crickets. Twenty years ago, everyone tells us, before
the construction of the New Shanghai gobbled up the landscape, in a time
when city neighborhoods were patchworks of fields and houses, people
lived more intimately with animal life.
Many found companionship in cicadas or other musical insects that they
kept in bamboo cages and slim pocket boxes. And young people, not just the middle-aged,
played crickets, learning how to recognize the three races and 72 personalities,
how to judge a likely champion, how to train the fighters
to their fullest potential. How to use the pencil-thin brushes made of
yard grass or mouse whisker to stimulate the insects jaws and provoke
them to combat. They learned the rudiments of the three rudiments
around which every cricket manual is structured: Judging, training,
and fighting. When Master Fung and other experts tried to
instruct me in the distinctions that allow them to judge a cricket's
fighting potential, they use a taxonomy that first appeared in
Jia ***-Dao's Book of Crickets, a 900-year old manual of training and raising
crickets that's been modified and supplemented but not overthrown
across the centuries. The book outlines the fiercely complex system
for classifying crickets. It brings request body color.
Jia identifies and ranks four colors: Yellow, red, black, and white.
By contrast, most cricket experts I talked to in Shanghai describe only
three colors: Yellow, green, and purple. Yellow crickets are reputed to be the most
aggressive of the three but not necessarily the best fighters, because
green insects, though quieter, are more strategic and according
to the annual illustrated list of cricket champions include a greater
number of generals. Color is the first criterion by which crickets
are divided and it confers an initial identity, that is held
to correspond to differences in behavior and character.
Below these gross distinctions, however, is the further set of division
into individual personalities whose total number is often put at 72.
Below that, classification is based on an agglomeration of numerous
physical variables, complex clusters of characters, length, shape, and
color of the insect's legs and abdomen and wings are all systematically
passed, as is the shape of the head. Current manuals might include seven or more
possibilities and differences in number, shape, color, and width
of the fight lines that run from front to back across the crown.
Experts -- experts also consider the energy of the antennae, the shape
and color of the animal's eyebrows, which should be opposite in color
to the antennae. The shape, color, translucence, and strength
of the jaws, the shape and size of the neck plate, the shape and resting
angle of the forewings. The sharpness of the tail tips, the hair on
the abdomen, the width of the thorax and face, the thickness of the
feet and the animal's overall posture.
The insect's skin must be dry, that is, it must reflect light from
inside itself not from the surface. It must also be delicate, like a baby's.
The cricket's walk must be swift and easy. It should not have a rolling gait.
In general, strength is more important than size.
The quality of the jaw is decisive. Master Fung tells us that the trainer's task
is build on preexisting natural virtues, to develop the animal's fighting
spirit. This indispensable quality is revealed only
at the moment the insect enters the arena.
Though a cricket might look like a champion in all respects, though the
judgment of its physical qualities may be correct, it can still turn
out to lack spirit in competition. This, he insists, is less a matter of individual
cricket's character than a function of its care.
It's the task of the trainer to buildup the cricket's strength with
foods appropriate to its growth and individual needs, to respond to its
sicknesses, develop its physical skills, cultivate its virtues,
overcome its natural aversion to light, and habituate it to new, alien
surroundings. Fundamentally, says Master Fung, a trainer
must create the conditions in which the insect can be happy.
A cricket knows when it is loved and it knows when it's well cared for.
And it responds in kind with loyalty, courage, obedience, and the signs
of quiet contentment. In practical terms, this as quid pro quo,
because a happy cricket is amenable to training and as its health, skill,
and confidence increase under the trainer's care, so too does its
fighting spirit. And as he was explaining all this, describing
the *** regiment he provides, outlining the many symptoms of ill-health
that one must be alert to, displaying the purified water, the
home-cooked foods, the various parts, explaining that everything
relies on communication and that the yard grass is the bridge between
him and the insect, that in other words, they understand each other in
a language beyond language. Master Fung removed the lid from one of his
pots and in an emphatic response to my increasingly unimaginative
line of questioning, took his yard grass straw and barked orders at the
cricket as if it as soldier -- this way, that way.
This way, that way. And the insect, to Michael's and my real astonishment,
responded unhesitatingly turning left, right, left,
right. A routine of exercises that Master Fung eventually
explained increases the fighter's flexibility, makes him limber
and elastic, and shows that man and insect understand each other through
the language of command as well as beyond it."
So a significant part of the book is -- involves, um, as I said,
involves fieldwork in various places. But an equally large part of the book is involved
with trying to think through the ways that we -- the ways that
humans think about insects and the ways that insects enter our lives
and enter our psyches in both positive and negative ways.
And one thing that struck me throughout working on the book was how
intense are the feelings that we have about and around them.
And as I said, many of these feelings are positive: The beauty of
butterflies, the wonder of fireflies, the sweet nostalgia that can
overwhelm us with the sound of crickets or cicadas but many are
negative. And after I'd written a chapter about how
amazing bees are, particularly honeybees, I wrote this chapter,
which is a short chapter I want to read to you which is called My Nightmares.
[Reading] "For a long time, I thought only of bees.
They crowded out all the others and this book became just for them.
A book of bees and all their bee-ness. All the physical capacities, all the behavioral
subtleties, all the organizational mysteries, all the comradeship,
all that golden beeswax lighting up the ancient world, all that honey
sweetening Medieval Europe, all those bees timeless templates
for the most diverse human projects and ideologies.
Bees took over. But then a plague of winged ants invaded my
living room. And after they left, I began thinking of locusts
and then beetles, all those beetles.
And then caddis flies, and crane flies, and vinegar flies, and
botflies, and dragonflies, and mayflies, and houseflies, and so many
other flies. Then one thing led to another and I came across
field crickets and Mole crickets and Jerusalem crickets.
And then my friend Jessie sent me a Weta from New Zealand and then
the 17-year cicadas emerged in Ohio. And I discovered the thrips and katydids,
remembered the aphids on California roses, and the summer wasps drowning
in water-filled jam jars.
And then termites and hornets and earwigs and scorpions and ladybugs
and praying mantises all dry in packets in garden supply stores.
And then there were the mosquitoes with long legs and the mosquitoes
with short legs and far too many butterflies and moths of all kinds.
And I remembered what we already know, that insects are without number
and without end. That in comparison we are no more than dust.
And that this is not the worst of it. There's the nightmare of the fecundity and
the nightmare of the multitude.
There's the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies, and the nightmare of
inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There's the nightmare of unguarded orifices
and the nightmare of vulnerable places.
There's the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the
nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the
surface of our skin. There's the nightmare swarming and the nightmare
of crawling. There's the nightmare of burrowing and the
nightmare of being seen in the dark.
There's the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the
carpet scatters. There's the nightmare of beings without reason
and the nightmare of being unable to communicate.
There's the nightmare of their being out to get us.
There's the nightmare of knowing, and the nightmare of non-recognition.
The nightmare of not seeing the face. There's the nightmare of not having a face.
There's the nightmare of too many limbs. There's the nightmare of all this plus invisibility.
There's the nightmare of being submerged and the nightmare of being
overrun. There's the nightmare of being invaded and
the nightmare of being alone.
There's the nightmare of numbers, big and small.
There's the nightmare of metamorphosis and the nightmare of
persistence. There's the nightmare of wetness and the nightmare
of dryness. There's the nightmare of poison and the nightmare
of paralysis. There's the nightmare of putting the shoe
on and of taking the shoe off.
There's the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backwards.
There's the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare.
There's the nightmare of the unwelcome surprise. There's the nightmare of the gigantic and
the nightmare of becoming. There's the nightmare of being trapped in
the body of another with no way out and no way back.
There's the nightmare of abandonment. And the nightmare of social death.
There's the nightmare of rejection. There's the nightmare of the grotesque.
There's the nightmare of real quick flight and the nightmare of
classroom wings, there's the nightmare of untangled hair.
And the nightmare of the open mouth. There's the nightmare of long, probing antennae
emerging from the overflow hole in the bathroom sink or worse
the rim of the toilet. There's the nightmare of huge blank eyes.
There's the nightmare of randomness in the unguarded moment.
There's the nightmare of sitting down, the nightmare of rolling over,
the nightmare of standing up. There's the nightmare of the military that
funds nearly all basic research in insect science.
The nightmare of probes into brains and razors into eyes.
The nightmare that if any of this should reveal the secrets of locusts
swarming, of bees navigating or of ants foraging, the seekers will
beget other seekers, the nightmares other nightmare, the pupae other
pupae, insects born of micro implants, part-machine, part-insect
insects. Remote-controlled, weaponized, surveillance
insects. Moths on a mission; beetles undercover.
Not to mention robotic insects mass produced, mass deployed, mass
suicide nightmare insects. These are the nightmares that dream of coming
wars, of insect wars without vulnerable central commands, forming
and dispersing congealing and dissolving, de-centered, networked of
net war of network-centric warfare, of no casualty wars, at least on
our team. Dreams of Osama bin Laden somewhere in a cave.
These are the nightmares of invisible terrorists, swarming without
number, invading intimate places and unguarded moments.
The nightmares of our age. Nightmares of emergence, of a hive of evil,
a brood of bad people, a super organism beyond individuals swarming
on their own initiative, homing info on scattered locations on various
targets and then dispersing only to form new swarms.
The nightmare of language, the language of bees, nightmare begets
nightmare, dreams beget dreams, terror begets terror.
Where are the bees now? Collapsing in their colonies, gliding through
their plastic mazes, sniffing out explosives, sucking out that
sugar water, getting fat and weak on corn syrup, locked in little boxes
at airports, sticking out their tongues on cue.
Who knew the tiny critters are so smart, said the journalist.
Fuzzy little sniffers. Buzz, buzz, buzz, keeping us safe, helping
us sleep easy at night." Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So I'm happy to take any kinds of comments or any kind of -- any kind
of conversation at all.
[PAUSE]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> So if I go to Shanghai, can I go to a cricket-fighting arena?
Hugh Raffles: Could you say that again?
>> If I were to go to Shanghai, could I go to cricket battle arena and
wager on some crickets?
Hugh Raffles: If you went to Shanghai, could you go to a cricket fight
and bet on it? If you knew the right people you could.
>> It is illegal like dog fighting?
Hugh Raffles: Yeah, you know, gambling is illegal.
So it's hard to go to a fight in which there's gambling.
But people might take you if you know people who do that.
But there are -- there is other cricket fighting. There's some -- there's cricket fighting which
involves gambling but people are also trying to promote cricket
fighting without gambling more as exhibition matches or to demonstrate
this sort of cultural sophistication of it which, you know, as you
can I hope from what I read, it's a very developed, very -- it's
very elaborate knowledge which is, and deep knowledge, which is connected
with it. And so there are a lot of people who are trying
to encourage, particularly encourage young people, to be
interested in that. And to develop -- to develop their skills
in judging cricket -- and judging crickets and raising them and training
them in a -- sort of in a format which is the separate from the gambling
culture which has been associated with it actually right from the
beginning. I'm not sure how successful they're going
to be at doing that but they're quite serious about doing it.
And it means that it's quite easy either to see exhibition matches of
that kind or else you can go to markets, open air markets, where people
sell crickets. And people go, you know obviously people are
there buying crickets and you can see crickets in that context.
And people have -- people have put on cricket fights there where
they're just trying to show the strength of the crickets that they're
selling. So, um, there's sort of like displaying those
crickets. As you can imagine, that's kind of a risk
because if the cricket loses, then, you know, its value is going to go down.
So there's a bit of a risk involved in that.
>> Are the crickets also used for agricultural purposes or things
besides fighting?
Hugh Raffles: Not that I know of and not those crickets.
I think these crickets specifically are crickets that are -- that
people train for fighting. But there might be, it might be just something
that I don't know about. Yeah.
Thank you.
[PAUSE]
>> What do you think we could tell the chefs at Google to encourage
them to serve more insects? [LAUGHTER]
Hugh Raffles: So what could the chefs at Google learn?
Um, well you know, what can I say? I'm vegan.
So personally, I don't think -- we should be telling them how to cook
vegetables. From what I can tell, they do that pretty
well already. Yeah, quite a lot of people eat insects either
as some -- either as a special food and like a luxury food, those
are the people who I met. People in Asia who collect grasshoppers and
they eat them and sell them.
But -- but generally, generally I've come through reading this book --
reading this book -- from writing this book to really like insects and
include them in the list of thing -- I wasn't really planning on eating
them anyway but now I really included them in the list of foods that I
don't eat. Thank you.
>> Question from VC. From San Francisco.
Hi there, thanks for coming. So just curious, when people talk about the
insect worlds, they often talk about them as almost alien because things
can just be so different at that level.
Can you talk about maybe the most surprising or interesting or
unbelievable thing you've learned about any particular insect in your
journey researching this book?
Hugh Raffles: Actually about the insect rather than the relationship
of the insect with a person? I think actually the part that I read you
that you have spiders and -- we can call them insects for now, but the
spiders that actually will -- and these are flightless spiders, obviously
-- that will or that have circumnavigated the globe on the air currents
that to me was one of the most amazing things.
And in general that there are -- that large numbers of insects are
constantly traveling in the upper -- well, I don't know if it's the
upper regions the earth's atmosphere, but say between -- it's not.
But say between 5 and 15,000 feet, you have these large numbers of
insects that are traveling in the air constantly. And that they're doing it not -- not in any
sort of passive way, but -- on a certain extent, I guess some of them
would be doing it in a passive way.
But there's a lot of them who are doing it in really quite an active
way. There are -- they're leaving a place because
they want to leave it, they want to find a better habitat or they
want to find more resources. And they get themselves taken up by the air,
going into the air currents, and then they can bring themselves
down at a certain point or they have ways of getting themselves down
to the ground at a certain point, and that to me was pretty mind blowing.
The invisibility of that. And yet, yet its existence as a widespread
phenomenon. In general, the -- it's something that continues
to fascinate me from doing this book is just the, maybe the obvious
-- the obvious thought that insects live in an entirely different
world from us. Their senses are completely different.
There's probably a lot more synesthesia going on, combination of senses
than we have. And they're obviously much more sophisticated
and much more sensitive to touch, say.
And they see in very, very different ways from us.
So it's not so -- after awhile of doing this, I've come to think that
it's not just that they experience the world in a different way but the
world that they move in is actually an entirely different world from
the one that we live in. So we tend to think of the world that we live
in as being the world because we experience it in a certain way
and we assume that it has this objective reality that is the world.
But to -- to animals who live in a completely different set, completely
different time space, have a completely different -- sense of time from
us, completely different sense of space, and whose relationship with
the world is entirely different, they are actually for all intents and
purposes, living in a completely different world.
And our paths interact, you know, and we meet each other in all kinds
of circumstances, obviously, but we're meeting across, almost like
across dimensions. We're living simultaneously in entirely different
environments. The things that we touch and the forces which
we're subjected to are really entirely different to these, to these
other beings. And we are also obviously completely different
to them we -- to a house fly, we move at the glacial pace which is
which why it is so difficult for us ever to swat one.
They see us in completely different ways and they sense the air in a
very different way. So that is me which this sort of I guess ontological
differences have been things which I've been thinking a lot
about in writing this book and trying to get to grips with in some way.
[PAUSE]
>> So I have a question. So when you look at ants and stuff, they look
like they're not individuals -- they're not like part of one
body like blood cells, like not every ant has a mind of its own but the
whole colony has a mind. And do you think some kind of different dimension
like you mentioned that ants actually the whole organism is a
single organism instead of each individual as a --
Hugh Raffles: Yeah, what the -- so, thinking about ants, say, as super
organisms that -- so rather than working as individuals but
collectively, they produce some kind of intelligence collectively
rather than individually, yeah. And a lot of people do think -- do think this
is the case that some of these animals really operate on quite simple
algorithms individually but when you put them together, then there's
-- there's some sort of synergy that produces some greater intelligence
-- intelligence that is greater than any individual that there's something
-- and people working in artificial intelligence have worked
along these principles in making -- and people work making robots,
for instance. I'm -- well, one -- let me give you one example
of this that I find kind of interesting which is work that a sound
artist called David Dunn has done with -- he's -- he's recorded, a
few years ago, he recorded the sounds of insects in ponds.
And so a community of water insects inside a pond.
And at first, when you listen to his recording and I guess I should say
that first of all, I don't think anybody else had ever done this before
which seems surprising. But people have -- there's a very limited
set of insects that people have actually done research on and very little
research has been done on insect sound communication, even on insect
hearing. Because he's a sound artist obviously this
is what he's been interested in.
So he's recorded the sound of insects in ponds and when you listen to
it, at first -- at first you hear really a lot of -- a lot of sort of
unconnected, disparate kind of noises or sounds. A lot of clicking and a lot of buzzing this
sort of thing, whirring, things that sound like static.
And after time as it builds up and it's probably the way he's put the
recording together , but as it builds up , you start to hear this very,
very complex -- very complex sort of polyrhythmic, polyrhythmic sounds
emerging. And that you get a sense -- this sense of
a very dense activity going on.
Now, as a musician, he interprets that as this very high level of
communication that's happening. He -- what he hears and it is -- he hears
the rhythms in it, he hears this complex rhythmic activity going on, and
he hears some insects responding to other insects.
And he thinks of the pond itself as producing some kind of -- or other
community within the pond as producing some sort of communicative
intelligence which is happening within that. You know, this, of course, is very speculative.
I'm -- you know, having done this research, I'm very sympathetic to
these ideas. The part of it that makes me pause a little
is the assumption that's often in there that individually these insects
aren't particularly interesting or these beings aren't particularly
interesting, it's only when they get together that something significant
emerges out of the collective.
So I like the idea that something significant emerges out of the
collective, but I'm less convinced that individually there's nothing
going on. And that they only have -- they only have
any significance when you put them together.
But there's -- there's certainly ways that insects -- I guess we're
talking about social insects here in general. Well, actually, I'll get back to that.
But in terms of social insects that collectively, they're able to
produce phenomenal things. If you think of termite mounds or ants' nests
or the kinds of decision making processes that bees are able to go
through -- there is -- there's the ability to cooperate to produce
remarkable collective, collective efforts.
And there's just collective achievements that they're able to do.
And they're able to do it in general, say within an individual hive or
an individual nest in a very cooperative way. I mean generally they're able to reach consensus
after what appears to be a process of debate and discussion.
But it seems also that there's a lot of communication that goes on
between insects of different species either communication that is to
warn other insects off and to, you know, sort of defensive kinds of
communication. Or there's also kinds of communication that
goes on to coordinate behavior amongst species.
And the communications [INAUDIBLE] on through vibration, through chemical
connections, all kinds of things. And it's been a scenario which there's been
very little research, I think.
But the parts fit -- that I've become quite interested lately are the
ones that people, ones that have investigated by people who haven't
had -- haven't had biological training so much but have -- have brought
ideas. I mean particularly like David Dunn, who brought
ideas from a different domain, you know, as a musician.
And he started to see -- started to see forms of communication that
have not been visible to insect scientists who've been really caught up
in chemical communication and looking at chemical cues from pheromones,
allomones and these kinds of things. Cheromones.
That's really dominated the study of insect communication for the last
30 or 40 years probably. And so it's interesting to me that people
who come with very, very different training, very, very different way
of thinking about it they've started to be able to find new kinds,
new kinds of interactions that have just been outside the paradigm of
investigation for the last -- for the last period, anyway.
Yeah. Thank you.
>> I know you spent quite a bit of time in the tropics when you were
writing an earlier book Amazonia and I was wondering if you have
impressions from the your memories there about whether there's a
different place in the world that insects have in the tropics than in
where we live in the temperate zone and whether the relationships
between human and insects seem markedly different thinking back on it
in that way.
Hugh Raffles: Yeah, that's a great question, thank you.
He's asking whether or not in -- the first research that I did was in
Amazonia, in a small community at the mouth of the Amazon.
And he's asking whether or not there's a different kind of relationship
that people with have insects there than you would find -- you would
find here and, um, in the tropics in general. Well, one thing -- one thing that I've been
thinking about recently in that respect -- is that I'm not sure whether
this answers the question in the way that you'd want -- but people,
you know, I've been struck by as I've been going around and talking to people
about this book, that one of the topics that comes again and again
is people's revulsion to certain kind of insects, particularly to cockroaches.
And people talk a lot about their instantaneous -- instantaneous
reactions to just sort of lash out and crush a roach.
And I think this happens in -- I mean, I come here from New York, but I
think it happens in California, too, but, you know, there's this sort
of immediate response. And part of that I -- I think is because of
the ways in which we control, control our living space and our
determination to keep it as free from -- as free from the kinds of beings
that we don't want in there as possible and just sort to manage
it in this very strict ways. And when I was -- when I spent time in the
Amazon, people had very different relationship s, well, I'll say to
cockroaches, particularly but to things coming into their living space
in general. I mean unless they were animals which were
actually going to cause them personal, personal pain or other kinds of
problems, they really weren't too bothered by them.
And also when I was living there, I wasn't bothered by them either.
And partly that has to with the architecture of the spaces.
Space are much more open and they're much more open to the elements as
well, at least the ones that I was in. So -- and people aren't trying to control
what goes in and out in the same kind of way.
So, you know, if there was snakes came in the house, you know,
poisonous snakes, people were really bothered by that.
When vampire bats came in the house at night, people got very, very
worked up about that, which was I was kind of grateful for.
And, you know, when there's mosquitoes at certain times of the year,
when you have like clouds of mosquitoes and you can't even sit still
because they're just biting you so badly, then people took, you know,
as much action as they could against them. And what we would do is set smoke off, going
in their houses to just try to get rid of them, which actually was
almost as uncomfortable as the mosquitoes themselves, right?
But roaches and things like that? You know, they don't really do us any harm,
so nobody really was very bothered by them.
They just scuttled around and everybody just ignored them.
And so this is -- you know, I feel very strongly this is a cultural
reaction that we have to them. It's not something that's hardwired as many
people argue because of the shape of them and the way they move and stuff
like that. There's plenty of places that you can go to
where people don't respond to them in this aggressive and negative way.
And it's fairly easy to train yourself not to do that.
But, you know, spend a bit of time looking at them, seeing how
interesting they are and trying to, I suppose, if you got an interest
in it, trying to retain yourself not to respond so immediately.
>> So just one last question, which in reading the book, a theme of
taxonomies keeps coming up and seeing the world -- see the macro
through the micro and vice versa. And I was wondering if you could just speak
a little bit more about that and that way of seeing insects and seeing
our sort of the world around us.
Hugh Raffles: Yeah, he's asking about taxonomy in general and
relationship between large things and small things and seeing -- seeing
large things out of looking closely at small things.
And -- I would say in terms of taxonomy one thing that I think I've
learned from the book is that we use the taxonomies that we use the
taxonomies that work for us. So taxonomies seem to be -- I like to think
we use the taxonomies that work for us.
Taxonomies are very -- are very instrumental. So scientific taxonomy is a very useful thing
if you're trying to understand evolutionary relationships.
And so it's a very useful thing if you want to understand -- if you
want to say develop conservation programs and this kind of thing.
But if that's not really your interest, if you're interested instead,
say, in training crickets to fight, then it's not really much use to
you to know that there are two species -- there are two species of
crickets. And that's really what you need to know and
then you want to protect those crickets because this is their behavior
and whatever. It's much more useful to know that there are
108 different -- I don't know.
108 different races and 72 personalities. And they have these different qualities, which
has no relationship -- you know, this is a classification system
which is actually more much complicated than a Linnaean -- Linnaean classification
system and has no relation to it but is much more useful
if you're trying to train crickets to fight or trying to judge crickets
to fight. So -- and of course in other -- in many places,
people have classification systems which rely on size.
So they might classify things in a system which would include insects.
It might also include seashells or grains of sand or other small things
or say distant airplanes or something like that.
That might be -- could be a system of tiny things that move or tiny
things that don't move or whatever. And it partly depends on what you're trying
to get out of system, what it's useful for.
That tends to be how we organize the world. But -- but the other part of your question
about finding large things and small things, yeah.
I think this is -- this is a very helpful way to look -- to look at
this book and to think about what I've been trying to do.
And again, I go back to tell you about somebody, somebody who I talked
to who had interesting ways of thinking about this, which was a -- who
was a -- somebody you might know, a neuroscientist, a Japanese
neuroscientist named Yoro Takeshi. He's well-known in Japan for -- not just for
his neuroscience, but because he's written these popular books of
social criticism about Japanese society.
And he's also an insect collector. And he collects weevils and other kinds of
beetles. And he has -- he talked about people, he talks
about people having mushy eyes, and mushy is a Japanese word for
insects. There's actually another type of classification
but it would include insects.
But it would spiders and all kinds of things. And -- he's friends with Hayao Miyazaki, you
know, the anime, the filmmaker.
And both of them were, um, obsessed with insects as children and in
Miyazaki's movies, you can see very clearly his interest in insects.
And it continues, if you think of something like Nausicaa, and other
movies, there's very often these very positive representations of
insects in them or insect-like beings, you know?
And they both have argued that -- that these, that insect eyes are
something that you can develop from this close attention to -- close
attention to insects and spending time with them.
And the kind of attention that you get from really looking at something
very, very small and recognizing that for that small thing, there's a
tremendous amount of variation in the world. So that even the category like insects itself
just does -- well, this might not be the way to put it, but something
like, you know, I want to say something like does violence to the individual
insects involved but that might not be quite, quite -- I mean they
would say that it probably does more violence to us than to
insects because we don't see the variety.
And a category like insects or like nature those are so general that we
lose that sense of the individuality of the beings.
And one of the things that Yoro said to me was that for each insect --
it's not just that every tree is different but every leaf is different.
And that if you can develop that kind of attention to the -- to the
difference in the individuality of things, then in his mind that can
also extend to more of an appreciation for the individuality and
differences amongst people and more sort of tolerance and respect for
people that can you also have from your relationship with insects but
you can also see how the effects of more large scale things say
something like climate change has effect on tiny, tiny things too.
If you're studying something as small as insects, then you can see the
effects of these large things on something like an individual leaf
rather than say just a forest and that will give you more of a sense of --
of the intensity of the effects and the breadth of the effects as well.
So that's one of the ways in which you start to see the relationship
between large and small. For other people, of course, you know tiny,
tiny things are the best place to see a microcosm of the whole universe
because it's in there you see the tremendous detail.
And I suppose like the wonders of mysteries of all things in many ways
right? Because as you get smaller and smaller it
becomes actually harder and harder in many ways to explain things.
You might say, well, it's all DNA or so whatever. You might find the tiniest molecular unit
can you find that will be the formative unit but fundamentally that really
doesn't explain very much about the mechanics.
And there's some -- an awful lot of other things which are left out of
that. Thank you.
>> Please join me in thanking Hugh Raffles.
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