Book : The Insects and The Question About The Basic

The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio.

There is this one section in About Life and Its Regulation: From the Life of Social Insects (pg 22):

These 2% of insects mainly ants, bees, wasps, and termites are capable of remarkable social behaviors. They are biologically created to have a strict inflexible routine for the purpose of their group's survival in nature. 

They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the numbers of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen.

These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes.

Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need - theirs, or the group's, or the queen's - they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances, it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed scheme. 

It is remarkable how these insects can do these huge things for their society without 'akal', how they are biologically wired to know what they should do from the beginning. And I began to question, what we actually subconsciously know that is already rooted deep within us - the things that we are actually biologically created for if we stop to think. 

All creatures are created intentionally, they just exist and seemingly know what to do, even for such a small living thing like bacteria. Somehow they know what to do to survive and procreate. So, how to know the main purpose of our lives if we scratch everything and go back to the basics?

Humans, we ponder, we think, we feel, we ask, we question, we improvise, we invent, we make art. It seems grand.

But we also conquer, kill, and destroy.

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