Alates and Elites

Much of the scientific study of human social behaviour — human behavioural ecology, sociobiology, and its various associates — owes a great deal to the study of the insect world. There is of course much to readily criticise such for; humans and insects are very diverse forms of life, much of their physiology and life history quite alien to the other. Indeed, because of a matter of scale — their size — it is not unreasonable to assert insects occupy a world apart from ours. More properly: it is a world within our own, a world that exists within the indeterminable nooks and crannies of our own place of inhabitance, teeming within the countless cracks and crevices of all the places on earth except for its deepest, darkest oceanic trenches, the bittermost cold of the polar reaches, and the intolerable, molten heats of the earth’s depths. Even so, it is a world that is far more expansive than what we know. We live on a thin surface, the edges of a heavily-folded, ecological sheet, our size, tolerances, and senses forbidding us from personally squeezing our way down in to its prohibitive folds, where only little, extraordinary things, of diverse shapes and incredible abilities, may slip into. Like the figurative sheet, once it is stretched out — dissecting and spreading open the countless secret passages through soil, wood, and skies — its true surface is revealed to be an area of unchartered vastness, an infinitude of microcosms among which the occupancy of man winds about as single thread.