| body without body |
[Jan. 7th, 2009|08:10 pm] |
A society of ants, bees, or termites achieves a kind of individuality at a higher level. Food is shared to such an extent that one may speak of a communal stomach. Information is shared so efficiently by chemical signals and by the famous ‘dance’ of the bees that the community behaves almost as if it were a unit with a nervous system and sense organs of its own. Foreign intruders are recognized and repelled with something of the selectivity of a body's immune reaction system. The rather high temperature inside a beehive is regulated nearly as precisely as that of the human body, even though an individual bee is not a ‘warm blooded’ animal. Finally and most importantly, the analogy extends to reproduction. The majority of individuals in a social insect colony are sterile workers. The ‘germ line’ — the line of immortal gene continuity — flows through the bodies of a minority of individuals, the reproductives. These are the analogues of our own reproductive cells in our testes and ovaries. The sterile workers are the analogy of our liver, muscle, and nerve cells.
-- Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" |
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