The Butterfly Effect
Insects and the Making of the Modern World
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating, entertaining dive into the long-standing relationship between humans and insects, revealing the surprising ways we depend on these tiny, six-legged creatures.
Insects might make us shudder in disgust, but they are also responsible for many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives. When we bite into a shiny apple, listen to the resonant notes of a violin, get dressed, receive a dental implant, or get a manicure, we are the beneficiaries of a vast army of insects. Try as we might to replicate their raw material (silk, shellac, and cochineal, for instance), our artificial substitutes have proven subpar at best, and at worst toxic, ensuring our interdependence with the insect world for the foreseeable future.
Drawing on research in laboratory science, agriculture, fashion, and international cuisine, Edward D. Melillo weaves a vibrant world history that illustrates the inextricable and fascinating bonds between humans and insects. Across time, we have not only coexisted with these creatures but have relied on them for, among other things, the key discoveries of modern medical science and the future of the world's food supply. Without insects, entire sectors of global industry would grind to a halt and essential features of modern life would disappear. Here is a beguiling appreciation of the ways in which these creatures have altered--and continue to shape--the very framework of our existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Melillo (Strangers on Familiar Soil) devotes this intriguing and comprehensive work to "the long arc of productive relationships between insects and people." The first of the book's two sections, "Metamorphoses," examines "how various cultures have come to understand our six-legged cousins over the past three millennia" and relied on them for certain basic goods. There is silk, for instance, which is produced by silkworms and became the driving force behind the Byzantine empire after the emperor had several eggs smuggled out of China. But there is also shellac, "a gummy substance manufactured by bugs," whose earliest recorded use Melillo finds in the 4th-century BCE Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, and which, more recently, provided the material for the first phonograph records. In the book's second part, "Hives of Modernity," he shifts to the here and now, with discussions of global agriculture and food security. In two especially worthwhile sections, he discusses how fruit flies have provided useful test cases for genetics, and how entomophagy the eating of insects has emerged as a promising nutritional, environmental, and even gastronomical practice. Melillo's fascinating survey makes a persuasive argument that some of the world's smallest animals are also "bottomless reservoirs of possibility."
