Word: ant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Yang You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant is disciplined, the grasshopper parties as if the good times will last forever - and then winter descends. Americans are, bless us, energetic grasshoppers as well as energetic ants, a sui generis crossbreed, which is why we've been so successful as a nation. Our moxie comes in two basic types. We possess the Yankee virtues embodied by the founders: sobriety, hard work, practical ingenuity, common sense, fair play. And then there's our wilder, faster and looser side, that packet of attributes that makes us American instead...
...time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again...
...Philippe Marquis, who leads the French archaeological team, points to a 26-ft.-deep (8 m deep) pit carved from the hill that exposes a cross section riddled with holes - like an ant farm pressed between panes of glass. He shows how looters dug wells, then tunneled horizontally when a promising layer was reached. (Looters, like archaeologists, know to look for signs such as ash or brick flooring for evidence of human habitation.) One such gallery has collapsed, so that it now seems just a jagged scar interrupting the smooth transition of history's layers. "It's like...
...sexual environment does sometimes loosen up in ant colonies. While the place may never become a Caligulan free-for-all, collective breeding will resume if the queen dies or is experimentally removed - but only until a new queen establishes herself and the reproductive lockdown resumes...
...Ant colonies have good reason to be abstemious places. When you're trying to hold together so complex a society without - let's face it - a lot of brainpower, you want a population made up of the fittest individuals you can get. A queen that has the genetic mettle to crank out lots of good eggs that produce lots of good babies doesn't need any competition from other, lesser females setting up a nest nearby. Even the queen herself is not allowed to fool with the gene pool once it's been set. She mates only once...