There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist's job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant.

There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist's job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant.

Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better.

I mean that it is possible to be unselfish without a moral code, sophisticated without and education, and beautiful wearing a skeleton on the outside.

People have this idea that nature dictates a sort of 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. That is just not the case in the insect world.