It started like any other mid-July zucchini-roasting session.
Balance the tray beside the trusty Weber grill. Turn on the propane. Wait a few seconds. Click the igniter.
But this time, there was no satisfying “whoompf!”
I gave it a few more seconds. Then a few more, clicking all the while.
Then, in an admirably ambidextrous move, I cracked open the grill with one hand, reached around, and gave the igniter one final hopeful click.
WHOOMPF!
Not a fireball, exactly, but a large enough explosion to blow the heavy ceramic cover wide open. And certainly large enough to set my heart racing.
A glimpse through the slats of the grill revealed the problem: a fist-sized mud dauber nest wrapped around the burner. Many of the tiny gas holes were choked with mud.
The first order of business was to knock off the nest. I let it cook for a while, just in case.
A few tentative pokes with a chopstick made short work of it. I figured there’d be some roasted critters inside, but I was surprised, on conducting an arm’s-length post-mortem, to find that the shriveled little beasties were…spiders?
I’d seen a black and yellow wasp with long, banded legs lurking around the grill, but it wasn’t until I read up on mud daubers that I learned I’d just had an encounter with Sceliphron caementarium, a thread-waisted wasp with some truly revolting reproductive habits.
So revolting, in fact, that this unassuming four-winged mason was at the center of a great 19th century debate between religion and science.
The first thing you need to know about the female black and yellow mud-dauber – it’s the female and her young that concern us; the male is neither here nor there — is that, unlike most of her sisters in the insect world, she lays only a dozen or so eggs her entire life.
But those precious youngsters are safeguarded in a most ingenious and diabolical way. The Sceliphron c. is a spider-hunter, which explains why the nest in my grill was packed with spiders.
But rather than kill the spiders she captures, Sceliphron c. merely paralyzes them and takes them back to her nest, where she tucks her prey into one of the clay tubes she’s made, and then lays a single egg on its belly.
The spider lives on, unable to move, until the egg hatches, whereupon the wasp larva tunnels into its belly and starts to eat. The larva eats and eats, growing stronger with every bite. Something in its genetic programming guides it around the spider’s essential organs. The central nervous system, without which the spider will die, is the very last tidbit the larva devours.
Something about being paralyzed, removed to the predator’s nest, and then slowly, agonizingly having your insides eaten by its brood really seems to have touched a 19th century nerve. A modern nerve, too. Perhaps you’ll recognize this horrifying life cycle from the Alien movie franchise, in which human beings served as paralyzed hosts for the alien queen’s rapacious offspring.
Sceliphron c. fascinated early naturalists, but also presented a serious theological problem: if God is benevolent, and His creation reflects his “power, wisdom, and goodness,” as one prominent patron of the sciences put it, then why should there be such violence and suffering in the natural world?
All kinds of explanations were advanced by apologists for the view of nature as a showcase of divine purpose; predators were necessary to curb populations and thus reduce the overall amount of suffering; God’s hand was visible in the ingenious mechanism employed by the mother wasp, or in her inexhaustible mother-love; the victims of her predation were even more evil, thus she was performing a valuable service to nature.
Enter Charles Darwin, who offered a radical interpretation of Sceliphron c., which was that nature is not fundamentally wise and good. In fact, when you get right down to it, nature is “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel.” If one views nature from the perspective of a kind of eternal war called “natural selection,” then the behavior of Sceliphron c. is simply one wasp’s adaptation to the problem of feeding her young, no different from any other biological adaptation, neither good nor bad, neither refutation of the hand of God nor proof of it.
Darwin’s view that nature is fundamentally non-ethical – not “unethical,” mind you, but instead representing a forum completely outside of human ethics – was enormously controversial in his time, and still resonates with religious believers today. Darwin wasn’t interested in questions of good or evil as they pertained to the animal kingdom. He was interested in the “how,” not the “why.”
Even so, he had a healthy respect for the “why,” especially with regard to a certain mud dauber. Meditating on Sceliphron c. side by side with the deep problem of evil, he wrote, “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 21 July 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
