TV-tips: Edward O. Wilson
lördag 18 oktober 2008
På Måndag (20/10) kl. 20.00 sänder SVT 2 dokumentären "Myrornas herre" om Edward O. Wilson, entomolog med en förkärlek för myror. Han har också gjort omfattande insatser inom andra biologiska och livsvetenskapliga områden, bl.a. biodiversitet, naturskydd samt sociobiologi.
Wilson har skrivit en fascinerande bok om myror, Journey to the Ants, ur vilken följande citat härstammar från.
"It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species."
"Ants in particular are arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison geentle and sweet-tempered. The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territiorial conquest, and genocidal annihilitation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."
"The ultimate sacrifice in public service is to destroy enemies by commiting suicide in defense of the colony. Many kinds of ants are prepared to assume this kamikaze role in one way or another, but none more dramatically than workers of a species of Camponotus of the saundersi group living in the rain forests of Malaysia. Discovered in the 1970s by the German entomologists Eleanore and Ulrich Maschwitz, these ants are anatomically and behaviorally programmed to be walking bombs. Two huge glands, filled with toxic secretions, run from the bases of the mandibles all the way to the posterior tip of the body. When the ants are pressed hard during combat, either by enemy ants or by an attacking predator, they contract their abdominal muscles violently, bursting open the body wall and spraying the secretions onto the foe."
If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.Referenser
B. Hölldobler & E. O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants, The Belknap Press of Harvard University (1994)
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O_Wilson (2008-10-18)
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[ID] is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for 'both theories' would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?Richard Dawkins
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Evolutionsteori.se drivs av Anders Hesselbom och Johan Karlsson
