Hey, DAVID: Ants and bees have something LIKE a social structure, but I don't think it really is quite the same as Pirsig's social patterns. Here's why... SODV paper describes it as the patterns of culture, family, government and the church. These things just seem too lofty for bugs. Its easy to make analogies to our social structures in describing insect organization, as in army ants and queen bees, but its just as easy to use biological analogies and they are perhaps more appropriate. I mean, it seems more correct to see the individual ants as cells in a larger organism rather than people in a city. The cells in our own bodies are specialized to preform certain tasks and work in conjunction with other kinds of cells to keep us running, but that doesn't make it a social organization. MARCO: >The same goes for ants and bees in their societies, and I do want to call them >societies. They might not have schools or churches, but they do have an egg >nursery, and a well drilled defense army. None of those are intellectually >designed, but they have evolved because they have social value. RICK: I've been too busy with finals to keep up lately but I think see something worth mentioning.... There seem to be at least two conceptions of SOCIETY floating around here: They are roughly--- (1) Society defined as "contra-biological" (2)Society defined as "contra-individual". As I understand it--- Pirsig's SOCIOLOGICAL PoV's are concerned with the first definition... If we decide that ANY organisms (bees, chimps, cells, etc...) working together in ANY sense constitute a society than I think we've lost the MoQ... There has to be some sort of distinction drawn between BIOLOGICAL COOPERATIVES (groups that work together to perform some biological function)... and SOCIETIES (groups that work together to "liberate" their members from biological forces). I realize that this distinction is a bit fuzzy... but I think it's necessary in order to get a handle on just what a "giant" is.... Is a giant just any old "biological cooperative" (like a beehive) or is there something more to it.... MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
