Free The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson

of the driver ants. A multitude of mouths must be fed with a lot of food, and frequently, because if not, the whole system will soon collapse. The entire colony, foragers and homebound workers combined, consists of as many as twenty million sterile females. All are daughters of the thumb-sized mother queen, which not surprisingly is also the largest ant known in the world.
    The driver ant colony is one of the most extreme superorganisms ever evolved. If as you watch it you blur your focus a little, it resembles a gigantic amoeba sending out a meters-long pseudopodium to engulf particles of food. The units of the superorganism are not cells, as they are in amoebas and other organisms, but individual, full-bodied, six-legged organisms. These ants, these organism-units, are totally altruistic to one another and coordinated so completely that they closely resemble the combined cells and tissue of an organism. When you see them in nature or on film, you cannot help describing the driver ant colony as “it” rather than “they.”
    All of the fourteen thousand known species of ants form colonies that are superorganisms, although only a very few are as complexly organized or as large as the driver ants. For nearly seven decades, starting in boyhood, I’ve studied hundreds of kinds of ants around the world, both simple and complex. This experience qualifies me, I believe, to offer you some advice on ways their lives can be applied to your own life (but, as you will see, of very limited practical use). I’ll start with the most frequent question I’m asked by the general public: “What can I do about the ants in my kitchen?” My response comes from the heart: Watch your step, be careful of little lives. They especially like honey, tuna, and cookiecrumbs. So put down bits of those on the floor, and watch closely from the moment the first scout finds the bait and reports back to her colony by laying an odor trail. As a little column follows her out to the food, you will see social behavior so strange it might be on another planet. Think of the kitchen ants not as pests or bugs, but as your personal guest superorganisms.
    The second most frequently asked question is, “What can we learn of moral value from the ants?” Here again I will answer definitively. Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are unappealing, pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brain, and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They do no work while in the nest and have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season when all fly out to mate. They are built for their one superorganismic role only: robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate (it is often a big fight for a male just to get to a virgin queen), they are not admitted back home, but instead are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators. Now for the moral lesson: although like almost all well-educated Americans I am a devotedpromoter of gender equality, I consider sex practiced the ant way a bit extreme.
    To return, briefly, to life in the nest, many kinds of ants eat their dead. Of course that’s bad enough—but I’m obliged to tell you they also eat their injured. You may have seen ant workers retrieve nestmates that you have mangled or killed underfoot (accidentally, not deliberately, I hope), thinking it battlefield heroism. The purpose, alas, is more sinister.
    As ants grow older, they spend more time in the outermost chambers and tunnels of the nest, and are more prone to undertake dangerous foraging trips. They also are the first to attack enemy ants and other intruders that swarm into their territories and around their nest entrances. Here indeed is a major difference between people