[White1]

(nu foarte) Scurtă digresiune literară II dar de data asta situația inversă: nu, nu când oamenii de știință își bat joc de literatură ci când scriu atât de frumos încât ai senzația că și-au greșit vocația.

And only one of them can make a bunch of ants sound so fucking epic:

As an adult in Panama I have stepped aside and contemplated the New World equivalent of the driver ants that I had feared as a child in Africa, flowing by me like a crackling river, and I can testify to the strangeness and wonder. Hour after hour the legions marched past, walking as much over each others’ bodies as over the ground, while I waited for the queen. Finally she came, and hers was an awesome presence. It was impossible to see her body. She appeared only as a moving wave of worker frenzy, a boiling peristaltic ball of ants with linked arms. She was somewhere in the middle of the seething ball of workers, while all around it the massed ranks of soldiers faced threateningly outwards with jaws agape, every one prepared to kill and to die in defence of the queen. Forgive my curiosity to see her: I prodded the ball of workers with a long stick, in a vain attempt to flush out the queen. Instantly 20 soldiers buried their massively muscled pincers in my stick, possibly never to let go, while dozens more swarmed up the stick causing me to let go with alacrity.

I never did glimpse the queen, but somewhere inside that boiling ball she was, the central data bank, the repository of the master DNA of the whole colony. Those gaping soldiers were prepared to die for the queen, not because they loved their mother, not because they had been drilled in the ideals of patriotism, but simply because their brains and their jaws were built by genes stamped from the master die carried in the queen herself. They behaved like brave soldiers because they had inherited the genes of a long line of ancestral queens whose lives, and whose genes, had been saved by soldiers as brave as themselves. My soldiers had inherited the same genes from the present queen as those old soldiers had inherited from the ancestral queens. My soldiers were guarding the master copies of the very instructions that made them do the guarding. They were guarding the wisdom of their ancestors, the Ark of the Covenant...

I felt the strangeness then, and the wonder, not unmixed with revivals of half-forgotten fears, but transfigured and enhanced by a mature understanding, which I had lacked as a child in Africa, of what the whole performance was for. Enhanced, too, by the knowledge that this story of the legions had reached the same evolutionary culmination not once but twice. These were not the driver ants of my childhood nightmares, however similar they might be, but remote, New World cousins. They were doing the same thing as the driver ants, and for the same reasons. It was night now and I turned for home, an awestruck child again, but joyful in the new world of understanding that had supplanted the dark, African fears.


Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker