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president.  His name was Ulysses S. Grant.35
Like ants, each one of us is built with all the equipment necessary
to be a master or a slave, a beggar or a king.  But most of us will be
only one of these.  We will dream of the higher fortunes that could
have befallen us.  But, for the most part, we will never taste those
possibilities in real life.  And as we grow older, many of us will carry
an increasing burden of resentment for the fates we failed to have.
In some ways, it is the social organism and its needs that
determine the role each of us will play...and the many more roles that
each of us will never be given the power to act out.36    How  the
demands of the larger social beast determine our fate is hinted at by
another aspect of the life of ants.  Some of these hymenoptera are lazy
and sit around all day doing very little.  Others work their tails off in
the interest of the community.  But try separating the ne'er-do-wells
from the industrious and setting them up as two new colonies--one
composed exclusively of layabouts and the other made up entirely of
nose-to-the-grindstone types.  A strange thing happens.  In the
community of laggards, a large proportion of the lazy little beasts
suddenly become imbued with a furious sense of industry.  They turn
into workers.  On the other hand, in the community composed
completely of workers, a small portion of the formerly zealous toilers
seem overcome with boredom and settle down to spend their days
doing nothing.  They become the new leisure-lovers.   Each new colony
takes on the shape of the old one.37
An individual ant behaves very much like a cell in a developing
embryo.  Any embryonic cell could just as easily be part of a liver, an
eyeball, or a toe.  What determines which of those things that cell turns
into?  Its position in the rapidly unfolding body.  The embryo is
"striving" to develop in a certain form.  The individual cell behaves
almost as it were looking at a blueprint, figuring out where it is, and
determining what it has to be to make the embryo come out according
to plan.  In a chick, you can take a cell that was about to develop into a
wing feather and move it to the location that's destined to be a foot.  If
  ars later, he was promoted to major general.  Eventually, he became
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