The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (46 page)

My mother said she had to stifle a laugh. And I laughed, too, when she related Kristen's words. Yet I can't help but think our laughter was cover for some deeply rooted disquiet. It's merely the brain's best method for dealing with this cruel yet basic fact of life—that it ends—stated here so rationally by a little person just in the process of recognizing it.

My mother, always prepared for the teachable moment, put forward to Kristen, "Well, Jesus is going to give you your body back, you know."

Kristen was not appeased. "That's weird," she replied.

 

The very intricacy—and weirdness—of the ichneumon's egg laying makes it difficult for most of us not to wonder who came up with the complex series of steps involved. Part of that is because humans seem to be, as professor of psychology Paul Bloom puts it, "natural-born creationists." His essay "In Science We Trust," from the May 2009 issue of
Natural History,
posits that where humans see order—anything that is not random—we immediately assume that an intelligent being has created that order. Bloom sums up the research beautifully: children aged three to six who were shown pictures of both neat and messy piles of toys, along with a picture of a teenage girl and a picture of an open window with curtains blowing, reported that both the sister
and
the wind could have caused the messy pile, but only the sister could have stacked the toys neatly; likewise, shown a cartoon of a neat pile of toys created by a rolling ball, babies as young as one year old stared longer than normal, which, according to developmental psychologists, indicates surprise.

I once found at the mouth of a sizable hole along a favorite trail a mashed garter snake, a flattened mole, and a deceased opossum. They were each uneaten and—I knew intuitively—could not possibly have all died there coincidentally. Rather, I soon found out, they were a stack of "toys," planted neatly by a mother and father fox at the den entrance, to occupy their kits in the dusk and dawn while the parents hunted and scavenged for food. (When the family moves to a new den, which they frequently do, the parents will actually move the toys as well.) A pile of sticks pointed on both ends, with the bark removed to reveal the white wood underneath, mortared together with mud and lined up across a stream, has never been the work of the wind in the entire history of the earth, but always the work of an intelligent being—
Castor canadensis,
the American beaver.

But being "created" does not inherently imply the existence of a creator, as evidenced in Darwin's work on Natural Selection. Bloom explains, "Darwin showed how a nonintelligent process driven by random variation and differential selection can create complex structure—design without a designer." So this instinctive assumption that complexity is the work of an intelligent being is true
most,
but not
all,
of the time.

Natural Selection, though, in itself, does not inherently negate the existence of a creator. It is possible to imagine that a creator put into motion several set laws—the laws of Newton, for instance, and the laws of Natural Selection—then, without interfering, let creation unspool itself.

But even this belief begs a question. I asked my mother this question once, when I was seven or eight. We were in the car, on the way home from my organ lesson. "What was there before God?" I asked. "Who created him?"

"There was nothing," my mother said, and her hands left the steering wheel for a moment. Her fingers spread, like the fingers of an illusionist, as if she were scattering something, everything in the known world, I guess. These religious discussions of ours were delicate and infrequent, almost, like discussions of sex in our family, too intimate to occur between parent and child. When we did have them, it felt as if we were too close to uncovering something—for her, something too hallowed to be near; for me, something possibly too tragic. "I know," she conceded, "it's hard to imagine."

But I did imagine it, using the only sequencing skill I had then: a two-frame comic strip. In the right frame there was a profile of a cartoon God, and in the left frame just blackness.

 

Megarhyssa macrurus
is a mixture of mustard yellow and auburn, with chestnut brown accents. From a distance, the wasp may look just dark, but pinned, as the female is during egg laying, and patient, as the male is when waiting for the virgins to emerge, you can easily get close enough to notice the mostly yellow legs, yellow-and-auburn-striped abdomen, and brown antennae and wing veins.

When the female is well into her egg laying, and possibly at the point of no return, she becomes even more colorful and, at the same time, more bizarre. We left her with her three tails separate and in position, and her abdomen curled in a downward circle. Once it is time to deposit the eggs, she uncurls and raises her abdomen so that it is nearly perpendicular to the tree and her body. Her tails remain in their same positions. But two of the segments near the tip of her abdomen open wide, like the first cut in an impromptu self–cesarean section, revealing a thin yellow membrane. The membrane, taut like the surface of a balloon, is about two centimeters in diameter. It pumps gently. It is as attention-getting as a peacock's display, but wetter, more intimate. Within that membrane you can see what look like portions of the ichneumon's three tails as they exist
inside
her body. Though the ovipositor appears to begin at the tip of her abdomen, as an appendage—like an arm or a leg or a tail—it must in fact be more tonguelike, and extend into her inner recesses. It's as if you're witnessing an X-ray, but even so, it's very difficult to figure out exactly what is going on. There are too many parts, too many steps, too much intertwining. Watching the ichneumon lay her eggs is like trying to decipher one of those visual-spatial problems on an IQ test: if the following object is rotated once to the left, and twice vertically, will it look like option A, B, or C? Give me the 3.5 billion years that Natural Selection has had—whether here or in the afterlife—and I just might figure it out.

 

Belief in an afterlife, and the manner of behavior, prayers, rituals, and burial practices necessary for navigating one's way to it, can be considered a universal in human cultures. But belief in an afterlife cannot be considered the essence of all religions. Certainly there were cultures obsessed with it—the Egyptians, for instance, who took part in elaborate processes of mummification in order to preserve the dead and aid them in making the physical journey to heaven. But, hard as it may be for Christians, for whom a belief in resurrection and the afterlife takes center stage, to understand, other cultures and religions either simply didn't address the afterlife or had a less-than-attractive view of it. Those who originally penned the Hebrew Bible, for example, did not conceive of any type of survival after death; God harshly punished those who did not listen to his Word in this life with plagues, fevers, famine, and exile, and rewarded those who did with immortality only through their physical descendants. Were Natural Selection an option for the early Hebrews, I believe they would have been more accepting of the theory than today's Americans.

Other cultures did conceive of an afterlife, but not the type that came as a reward for moral behavior or religious faith or acceptance of a certain savior. For the Babylonians and the ancient Greeks, immortality was reserved for the gods alone. Death for mortals meant a sort of eternal, shadelike, underground existence, where food and water would be merely sufficient. Incidentally, the Babylonian "afterlife" was so unappealing that it actually became the paradigm for hell in Christianity.

The concept that an afterlife is a reward for, or at least related to, moral acts carried out in this life was made popular by Plato and later by Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In Hinduism and Buddhism, one can achieve immortality only by breaking the cycle of rebirth, something I am not sure, were I Hindu or Buddhist, I would even want to do. (The only thing more comforting to me than a religion with an afterlife would be the ability to exist on earth forever; returning even as a dung beetle could be quite exhilarating for someone who'd already had thrills at observing eight-inch wasps in this life.)

An appendix to
How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife,
by Christopher Jay Johnson and Marsha G. McGee, contains my entire former worldview. In response to the question "Will we know friends and relatives after death?" the spokesman surveyed on behalf of the United Methodist Church says: "We will know friends and relatives in the afterlife and may know and love them more perfectly than on earth." This was a worldview I picked up during sixteen years of thirty-minute weekly lessons in a tiny basement Sunday school room at Patapsco United Methodist Church, where my mother was the organist and my parents purchased their bewildering number of burial plots. The church was high on a hill above a creek and across from a junkyard, whose collage of rusted colors I viewed every week through the window during Sunday services: old cars tethered to the earth by kudzu and honeysuckle, seemingly inert, but easily unfettered when a father or brother came in search of a hubcap, a passenger's door. Belief in an afterlife has been the grounding expectation of my existence, the hope I find so hard to give up even after giving up the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

 

Before and even throughout my adolescence I was a believer. I'd always held a sort of patient expectation for the Second Coming or some other miracle. As soon as I learned to write, I tried to speed things up a bit.
Sign here if you exist,
I wrote to God on lined white paper in a collage of yellow capital and lowercase letters. The color, which made the note barely legible, was not chosen for its symbolic connotation—enlightenment—but, rather, never even considered, in the way that children, caught up in the greatness of an act, overlook the details necessary to achieve it. I slid the note under my dresser, and checked it every day. One morning, I found that God had answered.

There came a moment of astonishment, then almost assurance, when I pulled the note from its hiding place. But too soon I recognized the blue Bic pen, the neat, curvy letters, the same arcs from the thank-you notes Santa wrote for the cookies we'd left him. Perhaps I would have believed it was God who'd answered if my mother had simply done what the letter requested. Instead she wrote me a note about love and faith, probably a series of X's and O's, like she put in our Valentine's cards. She was, and is, a believer; she would not forge his name.

 

Tim Lewens, author of
Darwin,
a book that deals with the impact Darwin's thinking has had on philosophy during the last 150 years, has discussed the very same question I asked my mother in the car as a child on the way home from my organ lesson. Although the question applies to any type of creator, in Lewens's interview for the Darwin Correspondence Project he specifically addresses the idea of the laissez-faire God who sets up the laws of physics and of Natural Selection and then lets them do their own work, the kind of God who might appeal to most scientists, the God that Darwin himself, Lewens says, likely believed in.

To deal with this question, Lewens draws from the rationale of the philosopher David Hume. If you subscribe to this type of God, you are still left with the question of who or what was responsible for God, and who or what was responsible for whoever or whatever was responsible for God, and so on down the line, endlessly. At some point, Lewens says, if you want to be a theist you have to stop asking the question of what came before God or created him and just accept his existence as—in Lewens's own words—a sort of "brute, inexplicable fact." And if you allow for the existence of brute, inexplicable facts, then you might as well just accept the brute, inexplicable laws of physics and Natural Selection. If the only purpose for a creator is to set in motion the laws of science, Lewens asks, then why on earth do you need one? According to Hume and Lewens, whether God exists or not doesn't solve anything.

When the question of a creator's existence became for me just a matter of semantics and personification, it was easy enough to put the idea of that creator to rest. Would the ichneumon become any less immanent if it were created not by some
one
called God but by some
thing
called Natural Selection? Both warrant capitalization as text, and both require faith of a sort. This part of the equation is easy, but I find it much harder to let go of the one thing God gave me that I coveted: an afterlife, and a clear path to it. I blame nature for this.

 

About a week after my second sighting of an ichneumon, I encounter another on the same path, on the same tree, in what I have come to call the "pinned" position. I wait for her to curve her abdomen up, split it open, and reveal its inner workings, but I see no movement. I poke at her gently with a twig. She barely stirs. (I have read that occasionally during the drilling process, which can take half an hour, a wasp's ovipositor will become stuck in the wood, and she will be left there, a snack for some predator that will pluck her body from her tail as if detaching a bean from its thin tendril. The ovipositor is left protruding from the wood like a porcupine quill.) A week later she is gone, and yet another ichneumon is performing her ancient task, already flexing the yellow circle. She is close to the ground, and the leaf of a small plant is obstructing my view. When I attempt to move it, my thumb and forefinger coming at the wasp like a set of pincers, she bats at me with her front legs, then takes off, detaching herself fully from the wood. Her membrane looks like a tiny kite. Her ovipositor and its sheaths, as well as her body, still warped into laying position, are like distorted and cumbersome tails, yet she flies, unimpeded, up and up, as if to another world.

 

Once, when I was nine or ten, I opened the screen door to share with my dog, who was lying on the back porch, the remnants of a grilled-cheese sandwich that I couldn't finish. The family parakeet, Sweetie, was perched on my head. The scene must have looked very Garden of Eden–esque: a primate accompanied by a parrot feeding a canine. But I'd forgotten about the bird in my hair, and when I opened the door he escaped to a high branch on one of the oaks that grew behind the clothesline. A crow landed next to him, looking huge and superhero-ish. But nothing could coax him to return, not even his open cage, which for the next several days we stood next to in the yard, calling his name. Immediately after his escape, I had run into the forest in tears and was gone for the afternoon. Later, on the porch steps, I asked my mother if Sweetie would go to heaven.