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Ants

Ants in EJ Applewhite

EJ Applewhite

I have finished reading "Paradise Mislaid: Birth, Death, and the Human Predicament of Being Biological" by E.J. Applewhite (published in 1991).

I found it fun and interesting to see the chapter related to EJA’s explorations of

Ants⁠

(no

Synergetics⁠

here!).

There are some interesting presentations of Entomological content, as well as psychological and philosophical (see pictures/text below).

Definitely some interesting avenues for discussion related to Applewhite’s conception of

Biology⁠

and also connections to free will and the [view from the inside // view from the outside] dialectic.

Not sure if you had seen/known about this

Ants & Media⁠

Synergetics⁠

crossover moment

@kirby urner⁠

however I wanted to get in all in here.

KU: ✅

⁠

Applewhite fleshing out himself as a character, e.g. his earlier career and then co-author with Fuller in

Synergetics⁠

— and then here showing, I am my own author, here is what I have to say outside/beyond Fuller.

Mockingbird

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm⁠

⁠

EJA keeping

Synergetics⁠

straight and acceptable. Whereas

Gray’s⁠

forays were past the line.

⁠

Applewhites Visit Oregon⁠

(web page at Synergetics on the Web,

grunch.net⁠

)

Also, side note, I read EJA’s “Washington Itself: An informal guide to the Capital of the United States”, which interestingly comes out in 1981 (a few years after

Synergetics⁠

coming out in 1975).

Maybe some of the walks around DC he describes, were during breaks while writing Synergetics haha.

⁠

Another tourist attraction:

The Exorcist Steps⁠

⁠

p. 175, Chapter 15 begins

⁠

176-177

⁠

178-179

⁠

180-181

⁠

182

⁠

Leading into the next chapter, 16, on “Conscious Evolution”, which starts with the question “Is there a possible function for man in the universe?”

⁠

From the images above, here are transcriptions made by ChatGPT-4o and lightly edited.

⁠

15 Ants & instinct

Ants show how much time nature spent nurturing instinct before she got around to investing in intellect.

Theriophily. In 1933 the literary critic and historian George Boas coined the term theriophily to express admiration for animals and their ways. In opposition to the dogma that mankind is superior to all other forms of life, theriophily advances a broad doctrine that the characteristics of animals are at least equal to, if not superior to, those of human beings. Dislodging man from his perch between beasts and angels, Boas quotes Pliny ".... it is hard to tell whether nature has been a kindly parent to man or a cruel stepmother." Nature gives the animals a natural covering of shells, hulls, spines, shaggy hair, fur, feathers, scales, or fleeces, "but man [says Pliny] she casts forth on his natal day, naked upon a naked soil, casts him forth to weep and beg; and no other animal weeps from the moment of its birth."

Ants as tenacious protoplasm. While men beg and weep, ant colonies flourish in dry sandy deserts as well as the dampest of rain forests and from the Alps to Texas streams. The ant world embraces 15,000 species, with a new species being described roughly every working day. They range in size from a millimeter long to three and a half

⁠

inches. Ants can be frozen for 24 hours and then thaw and survive; they can go without food for the greater part of a year; they can be submerged in cold water for eight days and be maimed to the point of decapitation—and still survive. Individual worker ants are known to live for up to five years and queens for from 13 to 15 years, while their colonies are so stable they can outlast a generation of men. They are made of remarkably tenacious protoplasm, a paragon of social animals in their variety, number, geographical distribution, in their ubiquity and their longevity.

The animal kingdom manifests no greater exemplar of pure instinct than the social insects, and among the social insects none has survived longer—since the Mesozoic epoch 200 million years ago—and under a greater variety of environments than the ant. They are the ascendant social creatures among the invertebrates just as mammals are among the vertebrates. The psychic attributes that make ants social is what makes them worth comparing with Homo sapiens (wise man)—the biological vessels of intellect who suddenly appeared just 30,000 years ago. Instinct has been around for a long time; flesh has harbored intellect—through which nature has achieved humanity—only recently.

But ants live in a condition of anarchic socialism, a system of unsupervised division of labor, in which, unlike human beings, a single individual has no survival value and if left alone will perish of its own accord. (There are no Robinson Crusoes among the Formicidae.)

Colonies of ants are least like the society of humans in that the role of males is totally subordinate to that of females,* [* Males are created only for a brief nuptial flight with the virgin queen, often descending to earth in copula, but always dying after consummation.] and that the specialized community roles of its members (mostly neuter workers) are fixed physiologically at the time of their hatching. But in two other respects they are most like men: the extraordinary instinctive endowment implicit in the complexity of their society, and the fact that they have no real enemy save their own kind.

(There are of course anteaters—the Myrmecophaga—who really aren’t that much of a threat, with their slothful movement and very small brains they have managed to survive only in South America. In most of the world earthworms play a vital role in aerating the soil and bringing new earth to the surface. But there are no earthworms in South America; hence the ants have such a field day to themselves. Hence also a few anteaters.)

The ants may not have many enemies but there is hardly any animal or plant that is not threatened by ants. Hence the potential victims resort to the shells, hulls, spines, hair, fur, feathers, scales, and fleeces that Pliny wrote about.

Ants in the taxonomic hierarchy. The taxonomic hierarchy for ants illustrates their evolutionary remoteness from man:

Kingdom Animalia: Kingdom Metazoa (multicellular organisms developed from an egg) Branch Eumetazoa (tissues and organ systems) Grade Bilateria (bilateral symmetry)

*[This is the level at which ant and man part company]*

Section Coelomata (three tissue layers; body cavity; with anus) Phylum Arthropoda (hardened exoskeleton or cuticle; segmented bodies and appendages) (Arthropoda are the largest and most diverse of all phyla, comprising 75 percent of known species.) Class Insecta (having mandibles, three pairs of appendages and one pair of antennae) Subclass Pterygota (winged or secondarily wingless)

⁠

Division Endopterygota (complex metamorphosis) Order Hymenoptera (membrane wings; ants, bees, wasps) Suborder Apocrita (abdomen and thorax separated by waist) Superfamily Scolioidea (parasitic wasps and ants) Family Formicidae* (Ants; all social in habit, a few parasitic) [*The family Formicidae includes all the ants. Formic acid occurs naturally in ants and it is the exudation of this acid that gives ants their venous smell. Hence pismire, an archaic English word meaning either an ant or an insignificant or contemptible person.] Subfamily (many) Genus (hundreds) Species (thousands)

A note on classes of ant study. Devotion to the study of animals other than man has flourished in modern times with the development of the various disciplines of zoology. Entomology is the scientific study of Insecta, the largest single class of animals. (Entomology comes from Aristotle’s use of the word entoma, to cut from. Compare the French entamer, to cut into a piece of cake or venture into a new topic of conversation.) Myrmecology is that branch of entomology devoted to the study of ants. In 1909 William Morton Wheeler, curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, wrote a great book on ants which remains a classic today. He describes the range of myrmecology as follows:

Ants, like other organisms, may be studied from at least three different points of view, according as the observer is most interested in their classification, or taxonomy (including geographical distribution), their morphology (anatomy and development) or their ethology, that is, their functional aspect (physiology and psychology).

The psychology of ants? A myrmecologist, Derek Morley, writing in 1953, hastens to reassure us that ant psychology is different from ours:

What is important to know is the degree to which it is permissible to think of ant behavior in human terms. The answer is simple—not at all. ... The mystery of the ants is in their empathy, the bond of nervous tension which builds so quick a response one to another that it seems more akin to a response to a nerve-carried impulse within a single individual than one involving two quite separate and recognizable characters separated by space.

Within the biological sciences, what are the specialized disciplines involved in the systematic observation and study of ants? (The breakdown of disciplines is of interest because the way biologists work reveals an explicit view of their approach to organic life in general.) Ant taxonomists classify specimens on the basis of their measurable visual and physical descriptions which inevitably lead to the assignment of an implicit place in the scale of evolutionary development. Biogeographers work on the geographical distribution of species, including ants. Morphologists classify ants on the basis of their structure (anatomy), their cellular characteristics (cytology), their submicroscopic tissues (histology), their embryology, and other factors both analogous and homologous. Sociobiologists study the biological—even the bleakly genetic—basis of the social behavior of living creatures including ants and men. The discipline focuses particularly on the mode of organization including the forms of communication, division of labor, and time budgets of both the group and its members. Some anthropologists have described six stages in the development of human societies: the hunting, pastoral, agricultural, com-

⁠

mercial, industrial, and intellectual. Ants have been perceived as revealing stages corresponding to the first three of those categories.

Ant society: instinct and group behavior. In the Holocene epoch we live in, the evolution of ants appears to have been arrested; they seem to have reached a plateau that might give man a chance to catch up. The returns are not yet in. Instinct and intelligence each represent basic tendencies of protoplasm in the form of living organisms. Instinct has reached its most complex manifestation in the family Formicidae, intelligence in genus Homo.

We do not yet have the answer to the question of how the phenomenon known as instinct is even acquired by organisms, much less how it is retained and passed on to successive generations. Most continuing investigations of this question assume that the information required is somehow manifested in a chemical or electrical way, with the information stored or transmitted by alterations of the shape or arrangement of complex organic molecules. Somehow the accumulated experience of the species is passed on to individuals whose behavior patterns are wired in from birth. In this hierarchy of living things, ants have a considerably more complex nervous system than more primitive creatures such as sponges, who have no nervous systems at all, while man possesses a vastly more complex nervous system than intermediate creatures such as ants, who have no intellect at all. Ants have enough nerve cells for instinct but not for intelligence, not for a capacity for learning. The fact that man has a sufficient number of nerve cells to have achieved intelligence does not mean that he has relinquished all the imperatives of instinct.

Edward O. Wilson, the founder and a chief pillar of sociobiology, has this to say about ants as a society without leaders:

... despite all our efforts over many years of research, those of us who study social insects have never been able to find a command center. No individual—not even the queen, an oversized creature concerned mainly with reproduction—lays plans for the colony as a whole. ... the activity of an ant colony ... is the summation of a vast number of personal decisions by individual ants.

Ants may make personal decisions but they must be on the level of pure reflex or instinct. The existence of social organization in insects is not dependent upon mental events. The ants have developed their elaborate societies without being remotely aware of the fact.

Insect societies are not so much societies as organisms. The nest of the ant is the operative unit, the isolated ant not quite an abstraction but it can occur only by accident. Philosophical biologists make an analogy between the ant colony and the cell colony. “The queen mother of the ant colony displays the generalized potentialities of all the individuals, just as the Metazoan egg contains in potential all the other cells of the body.” Professor Wheeler defines instinct as the activity of an organism acting as a whole rather than as a part, as representative of a species rather than an individual—acting in response to situations where there is no previous experience and with an end or purpose of which the organism can have no knowledge. “... [It] is certain that the man lives not who can tell where the whole begins and the part leaves off in a living organism, or can frame a satisfactory definition of a living individual or species; and the intellect abdicates when it is called upon to grasp an activity that is unconsciously purposeful.” If instinct is unconsciously purposeful, can intellect be likewise?

Plasticity. The instinct of ants and the intelligence of human beings illustrate parallel strategies of maintaining a natural social commonwealth in the face of vastly changing ecological conditions. Both strategies demand complex dependence on individual cooperation for group ends and for learned behavior in adapting to environmental extremes: This is a characteristic described by biologists as plasticity,

⁠

a goal-directed capacity for symbiotic accommodation with plants and with other species, and a shifting of the behavior of individuals from egocentric to altruistic proclivities.

Of all the attributes of ants, plasticity is the one most closely shared with humans. We have it on the authority of J.B.S. Haldane that man is the most plastic of all the animals with his patterns of behavior less fixed by heredity and more dependent on environment. From this he draws a comfortably unscientific conclusion: "This feature, which is so highly developed in man, and which we call plasticity of behavior when we look at it from outside, is called the freedom of the will when we look at it from inside. In any evolution which could be called progressive we are likely to develop it still further."

⁠

@Daniel Ari Friedman⁠

Thank you for this distinction of inside and outside.

From

@KU⁠

⁠

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