My Web Site Page 180Cake Placebo chose the topics covered by My Web Site Page 180 without reflecting upon the choices others have made. Flapping your arms and quacking like a duck when people try to run you over in their SUVs is another way to look at things in a different light. |
OvationsOvation 01Ovation 02 Ovation 03 Ovation 04 Ovation 05 Ovation 06 Ovation 07 Ovation 08 Ovation 09 Ovation 10 Ovation 11 Ovation 12 Ovation 13 Ovation 14 Ovation 15 Ovation 16 Ovation 17 Ovation 18 Ovation 19 Ovation 20 Ovation 21 Ovation 22 Ovation 23 Ovation 24 SitemapsSitemap 1Sitemap 2 Sitemap 3 |
Although the ant is a small animal as compared with man or with the Irish Elk, the "soldier" with its relatively enormous jaws is hardly less heavily burdened than the Elk with its antlers, and in the ant's case, too, a strengthening of the skeleton, of the muscles, the nerves of the head, and of the legs must have taken place parallel with the enlargement of the jaws. _Harmonious adaptation_ (coadaptation) has here been active in a high degree, and yet these "soldiers" are sterile! There thus remains nothing for it but to refer all their adaptations, positive and negative alike, to processes of selection which have taken place in the rudiments of the workers within the egg and sperm-cells of their parents. There is no way out of the difficulty except the one Darwin pointed out. He himself did not find the solution of the riddle at once. At first he believed that the case of the workers among social insects presented "the most serious special difficulty" in the way of his theory of natural selection; and it was only after it had become clear to him that it was not the sterile insects themselves but their parents that were selected, according as they produced more or less well adapted workers, that he was able to refer to this very case of the conditions among ants "_in order to show the power of natural selection_."[40] He explains his view by a simple but interesting illustration. Gardeners have produced, by means of long continued artificial selection, a variety of Stock, which bears entirely double, and therefore infertile flowers.[41] Nevertheless the variety continues to be reproduced from seed, because, in addition to the double and infertile flowers, the seeds always produce a certain number of single, fertile blossoms, and these are used to reproduce the double variety. These single and fertile plants correspond "to the males and females of an ant-colony, the infertile plants, which are regularly produced in large numbers, to the neuter workers of the colony." |
Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house. She felt some disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred, of finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of the world's misery, so that she might have had more active duties in it. Then, recurring to the future actually before her, she made a picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon's aims in which she would await new duties. Many such might reveal themselves to the higher knowledge gained by her in that companionship. |
This page is Copyright © Cake Placebo. All Rights Reserved. My Web Site Page 180 is a production of Cake Placebo and may not be reproduced electronically or graphically for commercial uses. Personal reproductions and browser or search engine caching are acceptable. | ||