The great biologist and student of ants, E.O. Wilson, was on C-Span the other day, endorsing, among other ideas, Einstein’s belief that we must all become vegetarians or turn the earth to powder. There are more than 500 vegetable species we could rely on, Wilson said; we have limited ourselves to five.
At the end of the program there came a religious moment. The moderator read an email: "What do you do about ants in the kitchen?" I was washing the dishes, and turned to listen. I have a problem with ants near one of the dog bowls.
Wilson said, "Be careful of little lives." Then he said, Well, ants like honey or bits of tuna, you can feed them that. Get a magnifying glass, study them. You will be seeing one of the most socially-organized societies on the planet. And this, he said, is what life probably looks like in other parts of the universe.
I was humbled. At the risk of stating the obvious, I had expected a murderous solution. But the amateur’s love of nature was alive in this great man even at age 78. Be careful of little lives.
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I highly doubt that life in the rest of the universe looks like ants. That would involve everyone thinking the exact same way. Further, an ant is among the most destructive animals on the planet.
Ants have been around for tens of millions of years, I think (maybe longer but I forget), so if they are so terribly destructive they're taking their time in bringing about mass extinctions and so forth. Humans, on the other hand, might have caused the Pleistocene extinctions that wiped out various large mammals and we're hard at work on a much larger extinction event now.
Did Wilson say what were the five "vegetable species" we have limited ourselves to?
Didn't Wilson once quip about communism, "right idea, wrong species?"
Why did we evolve to be so much larger (and less happy) than ants, which are so marvelously adapted to life on earth? The teleology of evolution never has made much sense. Why did ants evolve beyond slime molds?
Of course, I am making the assumption (a large or, if you prefer, a small one)that ants are, in fact, happy. They seem happy. They don't just march in a straight line like tiny humans would do: they meander here and there, apparently checking out tiny crevasses and bumps that are imperceptible to our huge, highly-evolved retinas. Their paths reflect a nice curiousity.
Still, I kill them without hesitation, especially fire ants.
I think I saw EO. Wilson with Bill Moyers and was struck by his desire to make the wolrd a better and more caring place. He made this point by stressing the need to look out for each other, including other life forms. Thanks for sharing this.
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