THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



94 



too familiar, their procedure was tactically sound because 

 it served the immediate purpose. But it may be proving to 

 be strategically unfortunate because it has resulted in a 

 dogged adherence to a "nothiag but" hypothesis which 

 some believe is already being exposed as untenable. 



A merely human weakness accounts for the fact that 

 many scientists, like many laymen,, hold onto a hypothesis 

 both because they are stubborn and because the hypothe- 

 sis implies something which they want to believe; because, 

 to put it more brutally, it confirms a prejudice. And it is an 

 amusing fact that the wholly mechanistic theojy of insect 

 behavior can be made to serve the interests of either of two 

 diametrically opposed prejudices. 



On the one hand, it is commonly upheld by atheists so 

 fanatical that they are afraid to admit the reahty of pur- 

 pose or intelligence or will lest the admission lead some- 

 how to a belief in God. On the other hand, one of the most 

 fanatical insisters upon the dogma that never, under any 

 circumstances, does an insect contribute anything to the 

 seeming "wisdom" of its behavior was that sincere and 

 orthodox Roman Catholic, Henri Fabre. 



Probably he had never heard of the yucca moth. At least 

 I remember no mention of it in the ten volumes of his 

 Souvenirs Entomologiques. But it would have delighted 

 him as a notable addition to his imposing collection of the 

 elaborately effective procedures followed by creatures 

 without intelligence. Every one of them was, he insisted, 

 proof of the existence of a God who, in his wisdom, had 

 contrived the little living machines which unconsciously 

 do precisely what they need to do if they are to live their 

 often outrageous Hves. 



Face to face with such phenomena as the cruel shrewd- 



