Word: ant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." The biblical proverb augured the work of E.O. Wilson, the pre-eminent biological theorist of the late 20th century who has explored the workings of the cosmos from the altitude of anthills. Wilson, 67, has used the study of minute creatures as a springboard for two crucial ideas. The first, expounded in 1967 in The Theory of Island Biogeography, which he wrote with the late ecologist Robert MacArthur, provides the scientific bedrock for understanding the decline of ecosystems. The second concept, laid out in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...
...product of a lonely, itinerant childhood, Wilson began studying insects at age nine. Later, his scrutiny of ants in faraway places ranging from Suriname to Vanuatu enabled the self-effacing Harvard myrmecologist to discover connections between the size and remoteness of ecosystems and their diversity, an idea that has proved crucial to understanding the crisis of extinction. His examination of ant social structure started Wilson on investigations that led him to conclude that the social behavior of all animals, including humans, is influenced by genes...
...Israeli worries, cause concern among Palestinians, other Arab nations and especially Washington, where President Clinton was counting on a Peres victory to continue the process towards Middle East peace. Netanyahu has pledged to take a much tougher line against Yasser Arafat, to expand Jewish settlements in the West bank ant to renege on the promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Hebron. Adding to the fear that peace with Palestinians is in serious jeopardy, Ariel Sharon, a senior Likud official said on Israeli radio: "Our government cannot accept the Oslo accord exactly as it is." Many now hope that the American...
John Grisham's 1991 thriller, The Firm, offered an inside-the-ant-colony view of lawyers being loathsome, a redundant concept that made him rich and had readers roaring for more. His subsequent page turners wandered from this antijuridical obsession to a more casual sort of barrister bashing that occasionally had other things on its mind. In The Runaway Jury (Doubleday; 401 pages; $26.95), obsession is back...
...record show that in the matter of human technology vs. the South American fire ant, technology has been its own worst enemy. Brought to the southern U.S. as shipboard stowaways in the 1930s, the fierce-biting ant (which likes to sink its mandibles not only into people and livestock, but also into electrical insulation, sometimes knocking out traffic lights) was officially targeted for eradication following the wartime development of DDT and other superpesticides. After three decades of spraying fire-ant territory with the killer compounds, however, the U.S. government was forced to concede defeat. It turns out the pesticides...