/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonyomus No.2932561]

It has long troubled the entomologists that the rest of us are always interfering in their affairs by offering explanations of insect behavior in human terms. They take pains to explain that ants are not, emphatically not, tiny mechanical models of human beings. I agree with this. Nothing that we know for sure about human behavior is likely to account for what ants do, and we ought to stay clear of it; this is the business of entomologists. As for the ants themselves, they are plainly not in need of lessons from us.

However, this does not mean that we cannot take it the other way, on the off chance that some of the collective actions of ants may cast light on human problems.

[Anonyomus No.2932567]

There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere, living out his brief life in a social enterprise that extends back into what is for him the deepest antiquity (ants die at the rate of 3-4 per cent per day; in a month or so an entire generation vanishes, while the Hill can go on for sixty years, or, given good years, forever), performing work with infallible, undistracted skill in the midst of a confusion of others, all tumbling over each other to get the twigs and bits of earth aligned in precisely the right configurations for the warmth and ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally incapacitated by isolation, there is only one human activity that is like this, and it is language.

We have been working at it for what seems eternity, generation after articulate generation, and still we have no notion how it is done, nor what will be like when finished, if it is ever to be finished. It is the most compulsively collective, genetically programmed, species-specific, and autonomic of all things we do, and we are infallible at it. It comes naturally. We have DNA for grammar, neurons for syntax. We can never let up; we scramble our way through one civilization after another, metamorphosing, sprouting tools and cities everywhere, and all the time new words keep tumbling out.

[Anonyomus No.2932576]

The words themselves are marvels, each one perfectly designed for its use. The older, more powerful ones are membranous, packed with layers of different meaning, like one-word poems. "Articulated," for instance, first indicated a division into small joints, then, effortlessly, signified the speaking of sentences. Some words are gradually altered while we have them in everyday use, without our being aware until the change has been completed: the ly in today's adverbs, such as ably and benignly, began to appear in place of "like" just a few centuries ago, and "like" has since worn away to a mere suffix. By a similar process, "love-did" changed itself into "loved."

None of the words are ever made up by anyone we know; they simply turn up in the language when they are needed. [...] Most new words are made up from other, earlier words; language-making is a conservative process, wasting little. When new words unfold out of old ones, the original meaning usually hangs around like an unrecognizable scent, a sort of secret.

(Excerpt from "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas)

[Anonymous No.2933715]

not science


bugs r gay as well

[Anonymous No.2933765]

>>2933715
One of the best argument Ive heard all day