Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.