Read Online The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edward O. Wilson
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plaque on your inadequately brushed teeth.
There is a simple evolutionary explanation for why our species has taken so long to comprehend the truenature of the pheromone-saturated world in which we live. To start, we are too big to understand the lives of insects and bacteria without special effort. Also, it was necessary while evolving to the Homo sapiens level for our forebears to have a large brain, containing memory banks expansible to a size large enough to make possible the origin of language and civilization. Further, bipedal locomotion freed their hands, allowing the construction of increasingly sophisticated tools. Large size and bipedalism together lifted their heads higher than those of any animals other than elephants and a few exceptionally large ungulates. The result was a separation of eyes and ears from almost all the remainder of life. More than 99 percent of the species are too minute in size and bound to the earth far below our senses to receive our ready attention. Finally, our antecedents had to use the audiovisual channel to communicate, not the pheromonal. Any other sensory channel, including pheromones, would have been too slow.
In a nutshell, the evolutionary innovations that made us dominant over the rest of life also left us sensory cripples. It rendered us largely unaware of almost all the life in the biosphere that we have been so heedlessly destroying. That didn’t matter very much in early human history, when humans first spread over Earth in the early logarithmic phase of their population growth. Still presentin small numbers at that time, they only skimmed energy and resources from the abounding and unsmelled life of the land and sea. There was still enough time and enough room to tolerate a large margin of error. Those happy days have ended. We cannot talk in the language of pheromones, but it will be well to learn more about how other organisms do it, in order better to save them and with them the majority part of the environment on which we depend.
8
The Superorganisms
I magine yourself a tourist in an East African park, binoculars raised, watching lions, elephants, and a medley of buffalo and antelopes—the iconic large mammals of the savanna. Suddenly one of the continent’s greatest and least understood wildlife spectacles of all springs from the ground a few meters in front of you. It is a colony of millions of driver ants emerging from their subterranean nest. They are excited, fast, mindless, a river of small, random furies. At first a teeming mob with no evident purpose, the ants soon form a column that lengthens outward, so densely packed that many of them walk over one another, and the whole comes to resemble a twisting, writhing bundle of ropes.
No living creature dares to touch the angry column. Every one of the foragers is ready to bite and sting furiously any intrusive object that might serve as food. Posted along the column are soldiers, big defense specialiststhat stand on raised legs with pincer-shaped mandibles poised upward. The driver ants are well organized, yet they have no leaders. The vanguard consists of whichever of the blind workers happen to reach the front at the moment. These dash forward briefly before yielding to others that press from behind.
At twenty meters or so out from the nest, the point of the column begins to spread into a fan-shaped front, composed of smaller and then still smaller columns. Very quickly the ground in its path is covered with a network of columns and individual workers, hunting and seizing insects, spiders, and other invertebrates. The purpose of the foray now becomes apparent. The ants are universal predators, harvesting as many small prey as they can subdue and bring back to the nest as food. The columns also drag home entire or in pieces any larger animals unable to get out of their way—lizards, snakes, small mammals, and, it is rumored, occasional unguarded babies. There is good reason for the unrelenting ferocity
There is a simple evolutionary explanation for why our species has taken so long to comprehend the truenature of the pheromone-saturated world in which we live. To start, we are too big to understand the lives of insects and bacteria without special effort. Also, it was necessary while evolving to the Homo sapiens level for our forebears to have a large brain, containing memory banks expansible to a size large enough to make possible the origin of language and civilization. Further, bipedal locomotion freed their hands, allowing the construction of increasingly sophisticated tools. Large size and bipedalism together lifted their heads higher than those of any animals other than elephants and a few exceptionally large ungulates. The result was a separation of eyes and ears from almost all the remainder of life. More than 99 percent of the species are too minute in size and bound to the earth far below our senses to receive our ready attention. Finally, our antecedents had to use the audiovisual channel to communicate, not the pheromonal. Any other sensory channel, including pheromones, would have been too slow.
In a nutshell, the evolutionary innovations that made us dominant over the rest of life also left us sensory cripples. It rendered us largely unaware of almost all the life in the biosphere that we have been so heedlessly destroying. That didn’t matter very much in early human history, when humans first spread over Earth in the early logarithmic phase of their population growth. Still presentin small numbers at that time, they only skimmed energy and resources from the abounding and unsmelled life of the land and sea. There was still enough time and enough room to tolerate a large margin of error. Those happy days have ended. We cannot talk in the language of pheromones, but it will be well to learn more about how other organisms do it, in order better to save them and with them the majority part of the environment on which we depend.
8
The Superorganisms
I magine yourself a tourist in an East African park, binoculars raised, watching lions, elephants, and a medley of buffalo and antelopes—the iconic large mammals of the savanna. Suddenly one of the continent’s greatest and least understood wildlife spectacles of all springs from the ground a few meters in front of you. It is a colony of millions of driver ants emerging from their subterranean nest. They are excited, fast, mindless, a river of small, random furies. At first a teeming mob with no evident purpose, the ants soon form a column that lengthens outward, so densely packed that many of them walk over one another, and the whole comes to resemble a twisting, writhing bundle of ropes.
No living creature dares to touch the angry column. Every one of the foragers is ready to bite and sting furiously any intrusive object that might serve as food. Posted along the column are soldiers, big defense specialiststhat stand on raised legs with pincer-shaped mandibles poised upward. The driver ants are well organized, yet they have no leaders. The vanguard consists of whichever of the blind workers happen to reach the front at the moment. These dash forward briefly before yielding to others that press from behind.
At twenty meters or so out from the nest, the point of the column begins to spread into a fan-shaped front, composed of smaller and then still smaller columns. Very quickly the ground in its path is covered with a network of columns and individual workers, hunting and seizing insects, spiders, and other invertebrates. The purpose of the foray now becomes apparent. The ants are universal predators, harvesting as many small prey as they can subdue and bring back to the nest as food. The columns also drag home entire or in pieces any larger animals unable to get out of their way—lizards, snakes, small mammals, and, it is rumored, occasional unguarded babies. There is good reason for the unrelenting ferocity
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