On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 10:24:15AM +1200, LizR wrote: > Yes, good point. It seems likely to me that people would notice that there > was a queen bee who laid all the eggs, and perhaps make some assumptions > based on that. If they noticed that the queen started as a normal worker > but was fed special stuff to make her into the queen... well, people > weren't stupid in those days! (Just badly informed on many matters).. > > In the interests of full disclosure, I should also quote the Bible. > > Proverbs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Proverbs>, Chapter 6, verse > 6: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider *her *ways, and be wise". > > Worker ants are indeed female... and they too have queens... but as you say > Samiya needs to show that this couldn't be ascertained, or reasonably > assumed, by ancient people before he makes any claims about it being > provided by divine inspiration (which I assume is his aim). >
Plus to confound things, in many languages, nouns have a gender that needn't imply anything about the gender of the referrant. For example, ant in French is la fourmi, and is referred as "she/her", regardless whether it is a male or female ant you are talking about. In extreme cases, the genders do not match at all - an example in German is das Mädchen, meaning "girl", a neuter noun. Perhaps we need to ask what the state of mind was when the Bible was translated into English - perhaps people knew by the 17th century when the bible was first translated into English (probably from latin, where ant is likely to be feminine) that ants were usually females. Or perhaps the gender is simply a bit of a hangover from the translation - just like we refer to ships in the feminine, even today. I have no knowledge of Arabic, but could it be that ants are feminine in Arabic? Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
