We’re now heading into Europe’s summer doldrums, when everyone seems to be away on vacation, to return only sometime in August. That’s certainly the case for France, which notoriously closes down every year for that entire month. Just enough time, then, to address a remaining philosophical question before packing up the family plus luggage in the car hitting the road. Audrey Dufour of the newspaper La Croix poses a piercing question: Is the mosquito [FR: le moustique] actually good for anything?

La Croix [Fr: The Cross] is well-known in France as the national paper of the Roman Catholic Church, so it is rather interesting that Ms. Dufour should take up this particular question. After all, the mosquito has long served as a key piece of evidence for those secular types ready to dispute the doctrine that the World/Universe is so wonderful and intricate that it must have been created by a divine intelligence. An argument that has spanned millenia and currently goes under the labels of “creationism” or “intelligent design,” it is often first attacked by bringing up the lowly mosquito: What sort of world-designer in His right divine mind would have thought to include that?

Human-mosquito interactions are inevitably unpleasant for the former across-the-board, whether looking down on a summer’s day to see an irksome insect drawing your blood, to hearing that bothersome whine around your head at night while trying to get to sleep. But that is ultimately small potatoes: what is truly serious about mosquitos is the ~400,000 people they kill each year by transmitting malaria, making them truly the world’s most deadly animal.

Right … Anything Good to Say?

That’s a pretty heavy weight on the debit side of the ledger. But Ms. Dufour gamely makes a good effort towards trying to find something positive to say. One word: Biodiversity, something Pope Francis has explicitly lauded in his speeches on ecology, and which here expresses the idea that the mosquito, no matter how odious, is an irreplaceable link in the great natural chain of being.

And it’s true, fish and amphibians eat mosquito larvae wholesale, while birds and other sorts of animals feast on the grown-up versions. Now, it’s not as if any of these rely solely on mosquitos for their nutrition; indeed, the article points out how it would be hard to prove that any would particularly be affected should mosquitos go extinct entirely.

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In the immortal words of English hip hop artist Mike Skinner (better known as The Streets):

I think you are really fit
You’re fit – But my gosh don’t you know it

Sorry, but that’s just what first came to my (highly cultured, don’t worry) mind when I first saw the below, thanks to re-tweeting by Le Figaro:

His papacy is not even one year old (that will occur on 13 March), but already Pope Francis has been flying high in the world’s esteem. And while I won’t go so far as to accuse Vatican officials of leaving their confines in the Holy See to find some local graffiti artists to plant that particular illustration on a local wall, it’s probably safe to say that the Pope and his officials have reason to be satisfied with their efforts so far to put this new Pope’s personal stamp on the office.

Another reflection of this – and going further with the Le Figaro connection – is the piece published today in that newspaper, “Pope Francis is more popular than Obama in the Internet.” Now, how are you supposed to decide who is more popular than whom on the Internet? Apparently it’s a function of how often people search for your name on Google and how often you are mentioned on the Web overall. The Pope ranks high in those two metrics (1.7 million and 49 million, respectively), although he does not top all individual markets. In Italy, where he lives, there are more Google searches for Silvio Berlusconi; in Argentina, where he is from, there are more (surprisingly) for the Italian comedian and anti-Establishment politician Beppe Grillo. And among world youth, His Holiness must take a back seat when it comes to these metrics to One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Then again, why is this subject even coming up? Examining the Figaro article closely, it’s clear that it has been touched off by a recent report on Pope Francis’ popularity from the Aleteia news service, which bills itself as “The news of the world from a Catholic perspective”!

That must give one pause. Look, it’s true that His Holiness made it to the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and that’s not nothing (although it’s less than it was). Still, remember that he has people working to make such things happen for him; remember also that when, say, HTC is suddenly the mobile telephone everyone is talking about, that fact stems from more than just that particular product’s qualities. But my gosh don’t you know it . . .