23
How Men Are Society's Dice
Why does nature so cavalierly dispense with the lives of men?
Mother Earth is normally a miser. But she turns into a spendthrift
under one condition: when she wants to gamble. Her two favorite
games of chance are sex and her own version of Monopoly--the
competition for territory.
During most of the year every member of an ant colony is
considered precious. If a worker ant sends out a smell of distress,
others rush over to rescue her.35 But in mid-summer or early fall, the
colony invests some of the surplus it's built up during the season of
plenty to produce a swarm of sexually mature individuals--new
queens and males who fly off by the thousands to try to find a mate.
The exercise is a gaudy display of disposability, a ritual in which the
colony that normally hordes every scrap throws its most precious
product--life--away.
Those males who manage to inseminate a willing female quickly
discover that they are marked for termination. Their amorous partner
gives them a fatal bite in the stomach, or simply leaves them to wander
and die.36 By satisfying their lust with six or seven swains apiece, the
thousands of princesses fill their internal sacks with a lifetime supply
of sperm. Now a new task awaits these would-be-queens: to find a
home. A very few succeed in stumbling their way over stumps and
rocks until they find a spot where a new nest can be built. This lucky
handful manage to establish a new colonies. Others try to make their
way back to their birthplace--crawling into the nest from which they've
come. Most are stopped at the entrance by sentries, attacked, para-
lyzed, and literally dragged off to the trash heap. Of three thousand
hopeful queens, eight may survive.37
Nature has gone through a prodigious waste, tossing away lives
by the thousands. She does the same among humans, killing hundreds
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