Word: ant
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...Ant. at Golden St., Thurs. (series tied...
When this seemingly innocuous phrase appeared in Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, it set off alarm bells as surely as ant pheromones trigger the defense mechanisms of a threatened colony. Critics scrambled out of the corners of the academy to attack Wilson's ideas as dangerously deterministic. To suggest, as he did, that human actions were more hard-wired than generally believed threatened to upset the balance of nurture so carefully guarded by those who held that environment, not heredity, shaped behavior...
...Ants is not only another milestone in a remarkable career but also a high point in crossover publishing. For the specialist, Holldobler and Wilson bring elegance and order to a complex subject. For the curious layman, there is a glimpse into the workings of evolution. Charles Darwin called it the tangled bank, a bucolic metaphor suited to his time and place. Today researchers see deeper into the diversity. "Mammals join societies as a means of furthering individual survival and reproduction," says Wilson. "Ants have arranged their social life so that the unit of survival is the colony." An ant...
...humanist, the ant superorganism is ruthless; biologists see it as efficient and cost-effective. A mechanism of this economy is altruism, which loses its noble meaning when applied to social insects. Ants are selfless only in the sense that they are genetically programmed to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony. Their fates take startling forms. There are suicidal warriors, for example, that explode in the faces of their enemies, delivering toxic payloads...
...future of the genre. The key is not in nostalgia, evoking the bleak era when real men wore raincoats, but in the brisk assumption of a '90s vantage point, leaving the author free to make all kinds of moral and social comments -- rather like choreographing the doings at an ant farm...