“All that name-­calling is irrelevant, really inapplicable. Roaches are ‘mean’ not out of hostility but because their stomachs crave food. If nothing else is around, they’ll eat another roach, even their own babies, as I said before. That doesn’t make them ‘cannibals.’ Roaches hide, but they’re not ‘sly.’ They conceal themselves, but it isn’t ‘guile.’ They attack, but it’s not ‘anger.’ The poet Tennyson said it very well: ‘Nature is neither red in tooth nor claw.’ ”

Hubbard, who had seemed absorbed in cleaning his pipe, interposed, “We’re simply talking about animals making the most efficient responses to different environments. There’s solid research showing that plants put on courtship displays, and, as one botanist tells us, they show promiscuity, and fickleness, and even rape . . .”

Bonnie protested, “Plants?”

“That’s right,” both biologists said at the same time.

Wanda Lindstrom picked up her theme. “It only emphasizes what I’ve been saying. We have to keep in mind that the insects don’t ‘know’ anything, no matter how purposeful their conduct may seem to be. They are driven by the purposes and urges of survival and propagation of the species, nothing more. Russell Homer wasn’t far wrong in seeing them as robots . . .”

The young man blushed behind his Ahab beard, pleased to be singled out by this authority from Harvard.

“I myself once wrote of termites as mechanical toys wound up by a God at play. Except that too often Nature is not playing any childish game. Certainly not here!”

“Darn right!” Reed Brockshaw coughed.

Peter Hubbard expanded on Wanda Lindstrom’s theme: “To put it another way, insects like these cockroaches are living out ancient, primitive compulsions, perhaps modified by mutation in certain particulars. Their activity may seem the result of ‘planning,’ or even of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling.’ But there is absolutely no mental calculation as we know it. Dr. Lindstrom is right in seeing termites and their ilk as just traveling biological machines. I can think of these roaches as nothing, really, except mouths on legs. Mouths on legs,” he repeated. “Which doesn’t make them less dangerous!”

Wanda Lindstrom completed the thought-­provoking image. “Just add sex organs, and a rudimentary nervous system, and you have Nature’s whole truth about a roach.”

“Makes it easier to squash them!” Bonnie Taylor muttered balefully.

Elias Johnson stayed on one track. “You both say something about their coming from a home base. If there’s billions, and new eggs all the time, that nest would have to be a damn big place, wouldn’t it?”