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
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