    24

    of t

    housands--sometimes millions--in war.  And there too, it is the

    newly sexually mature whose lives she flings about with abandon.  But

    why?  What does nature gain from this?  In the case of the ants, her

    reasoning is simple.  Each sexually mature ant's life is a toss of the dice

    in a casino where the odds are vastly against survival.  There are very

    few places suitable for habitation.  To find them takes tremendous

    expenditures of time and effort.  So the superorganism of the hive

    produces three thousand pairs of eyes and antennae, each of which

    will hunt for new real estate as if its life depended on it.

    And it does!  The innumerable adolescent queens and males will

    fan out, taking advantage of random shifts of the wind as they fly,

    landing to feel their way across the countryside.  They will explore

    every crack in the ground, every crease in a tree.  In only two days,

    they will dedicate 144,000 ant-hours to the property hunt.

    Very few of the old hive's new eyes and ears will live to establish

    fresh colonies from scratch.  But a handful will zero in on a suitable site

    for homesteading.  And the superorganism of the old colony will have

    achieved its purpose--spreading an offshoot into new territory.  You

    could call this expansionist effort of the ant superorganism a primitive

    form of imperialism.

    The annual swarm of adolescent ants is a gamble--and a cruel,

    costly one at that.  The only way to assure a win is to place a

    tremendous number of bets.  The strategy is one of the favorite ploys of

    the network mind.

    Among humans, nature favors one set of chips in particular for

    her games of chance--post-adolescent males.  T.E. Lawrence, in The

    Seven Pillars of Wisdom, rides with an Arab dignitary who, like most

    Arabs of noble standing Lawrence met, has dedicated almost his entire

    adult life to raiding--rushing into some cluster of tents a dozen miles

    from home, killing a few of the men and stealing the camels, the sheep

    and a few old clothes.38  Together, Lawrence and his friend visit the

    tomb of the dignitary's son.  The brave young man had taken on the

    warrior hero of a rival tribe--a tribe of cousins--in single combat and

    <<  <  GO  >  >>