Caterpillars, Science, Food

I'm actually previewing two books for Year 11. The other one is The Life of the caterpillar by Jean Henri Fabre. He's observing some pine processionary caterpillars and wants to experiment to see if they'll eat other species of pine, or just their native pine. But, however much all pine trees smell alike, the caterpillars only eat a couple species. Fabre makes this comment about science fabricating food on the assumption that one kind is pretty much the same as another:

"We must mistrust the chemist's retort when it pokes its nose into the kitchen. It may succeed in making butter out of tallow-candles and brandy out of potatoes; but, when it tells us that the products are identical, we shall do well to refuse these abominations. Science, astonishingly rich as it is in poison, will never provide us with anything fit to eat, because, though the raw substance falls to a large extent within its domain, that same substance escapes its methods the moment that it is wanted organized, divided and subdivided indefinitely by the process of life, as needed by the stomach, whose requirements are not be met by measured doses of our reagents. The raw material of cell and fibre may perhaps be artificially obtained, some day; cell and fibre themselves, never. There's the rub with your chemical feeding."

There's more. Muir observed that insects tend to be cooperative and communal when they eat plants, but insects that prey on other insects are too competitive for food/survival to work together - there's not enough food to go around for them to live together. They'd kill each other fighting over the food. And - communal insects only have one mother in any community: the queen. Maternal instinct makes mothers too fiercely protective to cooperate in a communal society. They'd never sacrifice their own eggs for the good of the hive or nest.

Here's his quote about what insects can teach us about forcing equality in order to have a communal society like the pine processionary caterpillars, who are as alike in appearance, ability and ambition as every other pine processionary caterpillar:

"If it suited us to go to school to the [caterpillars], we should soon see the inanity of our levelling and communistic theories. Equality is a magnificent political catchword, but little more. Where is it, this equality of ours? In our social groups, could we find as many as two persons exactly equal in strength, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight and all the other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity? Where should we find anything analogous to the exact parity prevailing among caterpillars? Nowhere. Inequality is our law. And a good thing, too.
A sound which is invariably the same, however often multiplied, does not constitute a harmony. We need dissimilarities, sounds loud and soft, deep and shrill; we need even discords which, by their harshness, throw into relief the sweetness of the chords. In the same way, human societies are harmonious only with the aid of contraries. If the dreams of our levellers could be realized, we should sink to the monotony of the caterpillar societies; art, science, progress and the lofty flights of the imagination would slumber indefinitely in the dead calm of mediocrity."