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November 30, 2005

What it’s all Coming To

Here in Texas they are called “waterbugs” – roaches the size of Kafka’s thumb, for those of you lucky enough to live outside of their range. The most remarkable thing about them is their highly developed repertoire of evasive tactics. Walk into a room where one has crawled up a wall to the ceiling and you may discover their “good offense” defense: they will fly right at you like a damaged helicopter. I guess the shrieking and flapping of arms that ensues tends to provide great cover for escape. On the floor I have seen them employ the zig-zag run used by foot soldiers to approach and destroy a machine gun nest. And often they will run in a circle, demonstrating the way in which and ever-changing angle tends to defeat a slow-to-adjust linear attack. Somewhere in China there is probably a style of Kung Fu called – The Waterbug.

So how do they acquire these tactics? It’s hard to imagine that any one of them would live long enough to benefit from the trial and error leading to emergent behavior. And surely they don’t teach each other such things – although it’s not too hard to imagine one of them dressed in tweed and lecturing. That leaves natural selection, with those bugs that successfully escape being the ones to pass on their genes. But how do such specific behaviors get into genes? It seems to be a stretch, but I guess if termites can build elaborate mounds complete with arched supports and air-conditioning systems, then waterbugs can accumulate the fruits of a long military history. Given enough cycles of procreation and death – a kind of picture flip-book of evolution when viewed from geologic time – complex expressions will appear. Each generation comparable to the refresh rate of a monitor.

Imagine this: An aging widow, living alone in a dim boarding house room, rolls up a Watchtower magazine and goes after a waterbug. The insect employs its spiraling circle tactic, but the slow speed of the old woman’s effort throws off its judgment and – whap! she nails it.

Days pass, and again the woman rises in the gloom and takes up her swatter. But this time the creature runs up a wall, leaps and flutters out into the room – and lands on the huge open Bible that rests there on its own stand. The woman approaches. She raises her swatter, then pauses, not wanting to splatter the pages. And then she gasps. The insect has raised its brown, chitinous rear, and its waving antennae have come to rest on a particular verse. The woman abandons the chase as the bug slinks away; she leans forward, placing a finger on the indicated verse – wondering what God could be struggling so to tell her.

Later, in the night, a host of waterbugs flutter down to the little table. They pause there, as if warming themselves at the inscrutable hearth of the great book’s gilt-edged pages….

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