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of t
housands--sometimes millions--in war.  And there too, it is the
newly sexually mature whose lives she flings about with abandon.  But
why?  What does nature gain from this?  In the case of the ants, her
reasoning is simple.  Each sexually mature ant's life is a toss of the dice
in a casino where the odds are vastly against survival.  There are very
few places suitable for habitation.  To find them takes tremendous
expenditures of time and effort.  So the superorganism of the hive
produces three thousand pairs of eyes and antennae, each of which
will hunt for new real estate as if its life depended on it.
And it does!  The innumerable adolescent queens and males will
fan out, taking advantage of random shifts of the wind as they fly,
landing to feel their way across the countryside.  They will explore
every crack in the ground, every crease in a tree.  In only two days,
they will dedicate 144,000 ant-hours to the property hunt.
Very few of the old hive's new eyes and ears will live to establish
fresh colonies from scratch.  But a handful will zero in on a suitable site
for homesteading.  And the superorganism of the old colony will have
achieved its purpose--spreading an offshoot into new territory.  You
could call this expansionist effort of the ant superorganism a primitive
form of imperialism.
The annual swarm of adolescent ants is a gamble--and a cruel,
costly one at that.  The only way to assure a win is to place a
tremendous number of bets.  The strategy is one of the favorite ploys of
the network mind.
Among humans, nature favors one set of chips in particular for
her games of chance--post-adolescent males.  T.E. Lawrence, in The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, rides with an Arab dignitary who, like most
Arabs of noble standing Lawrence met, has dedicated almost his entire
adult life to raiding--rushing into some cluster of tents a dozen miles
from home, killing a few of the men and stealing the camels, the sheep
and a few old clothes.38  Together, Lawrence and his friend visit the
tomb of the dignitary's son.  The brave young man had taken on the
warrior hero of a rival tribe--a tribe of cousins--in single combat and
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