    23

    How Men Are Society's Dice

    Why does nature so cavalierly dispense with the lives of men?

    Mother Earth is normally a miser.  But she turns into a spendthrift

    under one condition: when she wants to gamble.  Her two favorite

    games of chance are sex and her own version of Monopoly--the

    competition for territory.

    During most of the year every member of an ant colony is

    considered precious.  If a worker ant sends out a smell of distress,

    others rush over to rescue her.35  But in mid-summer or early fall, the

    colony invests some of the surplus it's built up during the season of

    plenty to produce a swarm of sexually mature individuals--new

    queens and males who fly off by the thousands to try to find a mate.

    The exercise is a gaudy display of disposability, a ritual in which the

    colony that normally hordes every scrap throws its most precious

    product--life--away.

    Those males who manage to inseminate a willing female quickly

    discover that they are marked for termination.  Their amorous partner

    gives them a fatal bite in the stomach, or simply leaves them to wander

    and die.36  By satisfying their lust with six or seven swains apiece, the

    thousands of princesses fill their internal sacks with a lifetime supply

    of sperm.  Now a new task awaits these would-be-queens: to find a

    home.  A very few succeed in stumbling their way over stumps and

    rocks until they find a spot where a new nest can be built.  This lucky

    handful manage to establish a new colonies.  Others try to make their

    way back to their birthplace--crawling into the nest from which they've

    come.  Most are stopped at the entrance by sentries, attacked, para-

    lyzed, and literally dragged off to the trash heap.  Of three thousand

    hopeful queens, eight may survive.37

    Nature has gone through a prodigious waste, tossing away lives

    by the thousands.  She does the same among humans, killing hundreds

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