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    y ou perform the maneuver in time, the former wing-feather cell will

    turn into a perfectly normal piece of claw.  The process is called cellular

    differentiation.38

    The same thing happens to the all-worker and all-drone ant

    colonies.   They undergo differentiation.  There seems an implicit

    sketch for the contours of the community.  A lone ant, in some peculiar

    way, looks around and sees where it sits in the social matrix, then

    becomes what it has to be to make the community fit the master plan.

    Human groups go through a similar process.  Researcher Richard

    Savin-Williams spent a season watching summer campers interact.  In

    June, the bunkmates met for the first time.  For roughly an hour, the

    campers felt each other out, probing each others' strengths and

    weaknesses, deciding who would be friends with whom.  Then they

    quickly sorted themselves into a superorganism with a head, limbs and

    a tail.  One camper became the "alpha male," the dominant individual,

    the group leader.  Another became the "bully," a big, strong brute

    nobody particularly liked.  A third became the "joker," everybody's

    good-natured sidekick.  And one became the "nerd," the unathletic,

    overly-eager sort that everyone else felt free to kick around.  Like the

    ants and the embryonic cells, each boy had taken his place in a kind of

    pre-ordained social blueprint.

    Just how pre-ordained that blueprint was and how much of his

    potential each boy had to sacrifice to assume his role became clear

    when another researcher tried an experiment.  The scientist assembled

    a cabin composed entirely of "leaders," boys who had been dominant,

    "alpha" males in their old groups.  Very quickly, the new cluster sorted

    itself out according to the familiar pattern.  One of the leaders took

    charge.  Another became the bully.  A third became the group joker.

    And one of the formerly commanding lads even became the new

    group's nerd.

    When the researchers went through the scientific literature to

    find other data related to their work, they discovered that studies of

    Chicago gangs in the 1920's had shown these long-gone groups

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