Wilful Blindness

When asked what science can tell us about the nature of the creator, the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane replied “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” With almost 400,000 described species and perhaps an order of magnitude more awaiting enumeration, there are certainly plenty of beetles. So an entomologist faced with a book entitled The Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests will immediately wonder which beetle is under discussion. Andrew Nikiforuk’s “beetle” is actually a handful of species of bark beetle (a tiny fraction of the 6,000 bark beetle species). He casts his net more widely in one chapter where he waxes eloquently on beetles in general. ((Nikiforuk makes a simple entomological error here: several pages are devoted to cochineal insects as if they were beetles; they are, in fact, scale insects, close relatives of aphids.)). But the book is more than just an enjoyable...