The story of the Protos and the Lepts

The three Proto scouts moved closer. They saw what looked like a Lept camp up ahead but wanted to make sure. Soon they were close enough to spot the entrance and, sure enough, there the Lepts were, going in and out, carrying food. The Protos had been right: It was a medium-sized Lept camp and near enough to their own for a quick attack. This must be the camp of the Lepts they had been encountering in recent days. Two of the Proto scouts turned back toward home to gather reinforcements, while the third stayed behind to guide the raiding party to the camp entrance.

The two scouts made good time returning home and announced their news at once. Excitement ran through the Proto compound as the story spread. A Lept camp only a short distance away! For as long as anyone could remember, the Protos had kept Lepts as slaves, and like slave-owners everywhere they needed to renew their supply of captives from time to time. For the Protos, nothing really worked well without Lepts. Without an ample supply of slaves, their whole society would disintegrate. It was not merely that the Protos were lazy, but they had kept slaves for so long that they were truly unable to care for themselves. The slaves could raise young, gather food, and keep the place clean, whereas the Protos themselves really excelled only at capturing Lepts. Otherwise, they spent a great deal of time lolling around their camp, acting bored, and asking the Lepts for something to eat. Lept slaves did all the work and were remarkably faithful to their Proto masters, even becoming ferocious participants in slave-raids on their own kind.

As the scouts made their report, a well-armed raiding party of both Protos and slaves gathered around them. When the group was large enough, the scouts led it out toward the Lept camp. One scout led the way over the carefully marked trail, the eager party briskly following in an orderly column. They soon made their way to the Proto scout left behind earlier and grouped excitedly for the assault.
Intimidating the few Lepts encountered on the way, the raiders advanced directly to the entrance. They forced their way through the entrance, attacking and pushing their way into the camp. The Lepts did not give up easily, and soon the fighting was fierce. As the battle proceeded, the distinctive fighting styles of master and slave became apparent. The Lept slaves fought hard, slashing and stabbing the free Lepts who were defending their home. As Lept struggled against Lept, combatants were equally matched, and the clashes often ended with one or both participants injured or dead. Encounters between Lepts and Protos, however, were generally quite different. Though the Lepts were brave, they rarely attacked the Protos. The Protos themselves almost never struck a blow. If a Lept did strike a Proto, the fast-moving Proto slipped neatly away. Instead of direct physical combat, the Protos preferred using an im pressive chemical weapon that each one carried. The Protos needed to spray only a few drops of this chemical and the Lepts were re duced to panic and confusion. They forgot about challenging the invaders but turned instead on one another, suddenly fighting among themselves in chaos and turmoil. All Protos carried this unthe battle. In fact, the Protos generally had no trouble defeating Lepts even when there were no slaves in the raiding party.
Meanwhile, as the conflict continued, several raiders pushed deep into the camp, searching out the Lepts’ communal nursery. Here, where the Lepts kept their young, was the Protos’ real goal. Because adult Lepts would never adapt to enslavement, the Protos had no interest in them. A Lept captured at birth, however, and raised among the Protos would accept servitude without question. Thus the raiders began removing infants from the nursery for the trek back to the Proto compound. Lept nurses rushed about trying to save their wards, grabbing up as many as they could and run ning for the camp entrance and the safety beyond. Many reached the entrance, but two Protos stationed just inside barred their way to freedom. These guards did not harm the nurses but allowed them to escape only after they released their precious loads. In this way, the young Lepts were captured and the adults were either destroyed or cleared from their camp and dispersed.
After the battle, several Protos carried the little ones back to the Protos’ camp, making repeated trips until the Lept nursery was emptied. They installed the captured infants in the Proto nursery where, under the eye of slave nurses, the little Lepts would learn their place in the world. This Proto home would be the only one they would ever know, and they would grow to adulthood un aware of what might have been. Any free Lept they met they would recognize only as an enemy.

For the Protos, it had been another successful raid. Several slaves had died, but the Protos themselves suffered few injuries. Owing to their chemical weapon, the Protos could raid the Lepts with little loss of life to themselves or their victims. If any society based on slavery could be characterized as “advanced,” the Protos certainly seemed so. Other slave-raiders that preyed on Lept nurseries killed as many adults as possible during their assaults. Some even ate their victims. In comparison, the Protos could pass as relatively civilized.
[...]
From this portrayal, we might condemn the Protos as barbarous creatures, but as you may have known all along the Protos are not wicked slave-keeping humans. Protos and Lepts are tiny ants that live out their entire lives in a world no larger than a dinner table. A Proto camp consists of one or two dozen indolent masters cared for by perhaps twice as many Lept slaves, all sheltered in an empty milkweed stem or perhaps within a hollow acorn. Free Lepts form similar colonies of two or three dozen individuals. The Protos’ formal name is Protomognathus americanus, and the Lepts they enslave are Leptothorax curoispinosus and two other closely related species. Their little domains occur throughout the broadleaved woodlands of eastern North America, from Ontario to Virginia and as far west as Ohio.

(Thieves Deceivers and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature
By William Agosta :3-6)



Jesus often used animals as symbols of something else for the sake of a spiritual message. E.g. pigs for half-wits who will always be so, pearls for wisdom, scorpions as symbolic of demons and so on and so forth. Nature is what you have in this debate, so use it. One would think that the cold toads would understand that, yet they do not seem to.

Something interesting to note about our sense of Nature as a Book and a story of Good and Evil is that a spiritual sense of right and wrong is a universal sense. Even a half-wit like Richard Dawkins lectures about "selfish genes" on the one hand and the beauty of his Mommy Nature on the other, as he is a rather confused little fellow in that sort of sense. It's the darkness of her womb, don't you know. Those who deny common senses often prove soon enough that they have not succeeded in denying their reality or "existence," only in perverting a spiritual reality that is just as real as physical reality. Entire cultures can engage in such denials of spiritual truths, and yet the way in which they do so reveals the same type of self-evident and common senses yet again.

I will probably write more on the revenge of Conscience in another post sometime. It has to do with the way that the sentence: "This statement is a lie." is constantly eating its Logos with its words. If it is true then it is false, if it is false then it is not true. The Anti-Word is like a snake that eats its own tail so that it has neither a tail nor a tale. So you can try to disagree with the fact that our sense of right and wrong regarding Nature is universal and an absolute self-evident truth that is evident in the Self. Yet then all you have done is prove that you have a sense of right and wrong that has been perverted into a sense that being wrong is right.

One of the favorite arguments of Darwinists is to plead to our sense of what is wrong in Nature, so they would take the above tale of the ants that go marching on and combine it with prissy Christianity to argue something like: "How can a Good God allow the evil of slavery in ant colonies...and humans too! How? How, I say?! Well, since a Good God can't allow it then that means that natural selections explains it all better." That is a classic Darwinist argument, yet it is ignorant and stupid for many reasons. Is it really the Christian view of God that God will not allow evil to happen? Faith is the answer to evil, that seems to me to be the Christian view. The Christian answer is not some half-witted argument about how Nature has selected all things because would you just look at how evil things are. The natural theology behind such Darwinian sentiments or arguments is not Christian, although prissy Christians on the Left seem to tend to think the same way as Darwinists.

On the other hand, the notion that natural selection and random mutation can, by the "chance" selections of the Blind Watchmaker, create an ant may be equally ignorant on the how question as the Darwinian answer to the why question. Example, how the ants go marching on:

There are dozens of examples where advances in technology have emphasized the ingenuity of biological design. One fascinating example of this was the construction of the Soviet lunar exploratory machine, the Lunakod, which moved by articulated legs. Legs, rather than wheels, were chosen because of the much greater ease with which an articulated machine could traverse the uneven terrain likely to be met on the lunar surface. Altogether, the Lunakod eerily resembled a giant ant, so much so that it was no longer possible to look on the articulated legs of an insect without a new sense of awe and the realization that what one had once taken for granted, and superficially considered a simple adaptation, represented a very sophisticated technological solution to the problem of mobility over an uneven terrain. The control mechanisms necessary to coordinate the motion of articulated legs are far more complicated than might be imagined at first sight. As Raibert and Sutherland, who are currently working in this area, admit.

It is clear that very sophisticated computer-control programs will be an important component of machines that smoothly crawl, walk or run.

(Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
By Michael Denton :333)

The insect as anthropomorphized metaphor: