    22

    22

    ye

    president.  His name was Ulysses S. Grant.35

    Like ants, each one of us is built with all the equipment necessary

    to be a master or a slave, a beggar or a king.  But most of us will be

    only one of these.  We will dream of the higher fortunes that could

    have befallen us.  But, for the most part, we will never taste those

    possibilities in real life.  And as we grow older, many of us will carry

    an increasing burden of resentment for the fates we failed to have.

    In some ways, it is the social organism and its needs that

    determine the role each of us will play...and the many more roles that

    each of us will never be given the power to act out.36    How  the

    demands of the larger social beast determine our fate is hinted at by

    another aspect of the life of ants.  Some of these hymenoptera are lazy

    and sit around all day doing very little.  Others work their tails off in

    the interest of the community.  But try separating the ne'er-do-wells

    from the industrious and setting them up as two new colonies--one

    composed exclusively of layabouts and the other made up entirely of

    nose-to-the-grindstone types.  A strange thing happens.  In the

    community of laggards, a large proportion of the lazy little beasts

    suddenly become imbued with a furious sense of industry.  They turn

    into workers.  On the other hand, in the community composed

    completely of workers, a small portion of the formerly zealous toilers

    seem overcome with boredom and settle down to spend their days

    doing nothing.  They become the new leisure-lovers.   Each new colony

    takes on the shape of the old one.37

    An individual ant behaves very much like a cell in a developing

    embryo.  Any embryonic cell could just as easily be part of a liver, an

    eyeball, or a toe.  What determines which of those things that cell turns

    into?  Its position in the rapidly unfolding body.  The embryo is

    "striving" to develop in a certain form.  The individual cell behaves

    almost as it were looking at a blueprint, figuring out where it is, and

    determining what it has to be to make the embryo come out according

    to plan.  In a chick, you can take a cell that was about to develop into a

    wing feather and move it to the location that's destined to be a foot.  If

      ars later, he was promoted to major general.  Eventually, he became

    <<  <  GO  >  >>