The Latter Rain...
Salvation comes from God, whom the Bible calls as the Living God and Savior. God is employing a human being in order for His will to be fulfilled ... and that is the salvation of man.
Our Lord Jesus Christ will bring two kinds of salvation, through the Bible. At the time He assumed human form, He saved Israel from its sinfulness. That is written in Matthew 1:21, which says-
"And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."
However, when He comes again, for the second time, He will bring salvation to the faithful. And, the Bible is teaching us how we can become one among those people that our Lord Jesus Christ will save come judgment day. The first verse that we have to pay attention to is Ephesians 3:6, which says-
"That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the Gospel."
St. Paul, the Apostle, said, "The Gentiles should be fellow heirs." But before we continue analyzing this verse, let us find out from the Bible: who are called "Gentiles" and why are they also called "heirs?" In Ephesians 2:11-12, this is what is written--
"Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world."
In those lines, St. Paul reminds the Christians in Ephesus of their former conditions. According to the Bible, during those times, "they were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel." Therefore, Biblically speaking, the Gentiles are those who were apart from Christ. They were "strangers from the covenants of promise," ... they were the hopeless, and they were without a God in the world because they were not part of Israel. And we, who live at the present time, may also be called Gentiles if we will use the Bible as our basis.
According to St. Paul, for the Gentiles to be a part of the salvation that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ, they have to be made parts first of the body; and only after that will they become partakers of a promise in Christ by the Gospel.
You will notice that St. Paul made reference to a "body" ... a body into which the Gentiles must integrate themselves so that they also become heirs. The explanation to that may be read in Colossians 1:18-
"And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the first born from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence."
Therefore, the body whose head is Christ is the CHURCH. At this point, we must understand that the Gentiles, like us, must join the body, or the Church. And when we say that we must join the Church, it means that we no longer have to build any. We no longer have to establish our own church just for us to become partakers of a promise in Christ.
And whenever we say "join," or be a part of the body, of the Church, it denotes that, there is already an existing Church. In fact, this Church already exists even before the promise of salvation was given to the Gentiles. There is an existing Church even before Paul was made apostle. And this was the same Church that our Lord Jesus Christ taught, when he assumed human form. ... And there can never be another church.
Today, there are preachers who claim that another church had appeared in the Philippines. And according to them, this church was different from the one in Israel. If this is the case, it would appear that, despite the fact that there was already a church in Israel, another church appeared in the Philippines. As far as the Bible is concerned, such a belief is wrong because, according to St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, in 4:4-
"There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling."
There is just one body ... there is no other body. And the proof that there is only one body can be read in Colossians 3:15-
"And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which ye are called in one body; and ye be thankful."
Here, St. Paul is addressing the brethren who, in the beginning were Gentiles, but were eventually called to one body. In other words, the body that the early Christians (the Israelites) made themselves a part of, is also the same body, or church, into which the Gentiles were being called upon to join. Now, if the Gentiles will just integrate themselves to the body, then, the Church will remain ONE.
It is against the teachings of God, and of the Holy Scripture, that other churches is built in other places, let's say in the US, or in England, or in Germany, or in Rome. They also claim that another church had also been founded in the Philippines. The truth is, God did not give any right to anybody to build his own church. It is indeed disgusting that today, a lot of ministers build churches of their own. They deliberately oppose and defy what the Bible said - that, the Gentiles, like us, must join or make ourselves a part of the body, or the Church, for us to be saved.
And what is the reason why we must abide by it? It is because, as far as God is concerned, He did not give anybody His consent to build a church right now in our time. This is what Psalms 127:1 says-
"Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that built it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
The verse mentioned of a "house," which becomes useless if it is not built by the Lord. Let us now ask the Bible. What is being referred to as the "house," which only God has the right to build? In I Timothy 3:15, it says-
"But if I tarry long , that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
If you have noticed, in the New Testament, the word house refers to the Church of God. This is, truly, the house of God because it was built by God, Himself. That is why, if, in our time, you come across churches, whose founders are also their ministers, you can be sure that they are NOT REAL!
More discussions here...
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Ants Create A Lifeboat...
These ants in a video have a mission to accomplish: to transport their queen and their larvae through and over the water using and turning themselves into a lifeboat!
Watch their extra ordinary feat as they cross over the water without fear of the danger waiting ahead: the fish that may devour them, the flow of the currents, and the strong winds that may get them away from safety.
Notice these ants closely as they frantically and decisively working towards their goal… and without being commanded, each one working like a possessed being.
Charles Darwin University researchers say the Territory's much maligned green ants could be the good blokes in disguise when it comes to mango orchards. Sure they bite, but apparently the ants chew on all manner of pests and nasties that do far more damage to the fruit and the trees. Early figures show production in conventional orchards can be boosted by more than 50 per cent and substantially more than that in organic trees. The university's green ant project coordinator Associate Professor Keith Christian told our reporter Jack Ellis the green ants are very effective pest controllers. "If you manage the green ants properly you can use them instead of insecticides to control the pests and increase yield, increase fruit quality, decrease the cost of production and therefore increase profit. They chase down insects and eat them - caterpillars, leaf hoppers, borers, fruit fly, if they don't eat them they chase them away. The advantage with green ants, they're always on the trees. Unless it's really cool they're patrolling 24 hours a day seven days a week."
Ants, particularly green ants, excite Simon Roberts. Sitting under a rubber tree in North Queensland he tells us of their clever architectural and farming skills. He's also discovered ants that swim. Another scientist, who could be called the queen of ant researchers, is Professor Deborah Gordon, who spends her summers in the searing heat of the Arizona desert looking at popultions of a species called harvester ants, and she's made some remarkable discoveries about their behaviour and genetics.
Transcript...
Simon Robson: In the trees is a green tree ant nest and leaves have been pulled together and they've been connected with silk that comes from the larvae and it represents one of the most complex behaviours that socials insects perform and here it is on campus right in front of us, it's quite amazing.
Robyn Williams: Yes, we're sitting under a rubber tree on the campus of James Cook University in Townsville, Simon Robson and I. He's Senior Lecturer in tropical biology there and he's excited about those clever architects and farmers - the green ants. But he's also delighted by his discovery of the ant equivalent of Ian Thorpe who churn up the water. But back to those green ants.
Simon Robson: Well, I guess they're building the nest as a place to live but what I'm interested in as how that behaviour sort of evolved because the nest is made from silk that comes from the larvae. Much as butterflies build cocoons what happens in these ants is that the larvae produce silk. Instead of making a cocoon the workers pick them up and shuttle them around and use them like little sewing machines and they make a nest out of silk and then when the larvae are finished that pupae without making any cocoons at all.
Robyn Williams: And of course you can see green ant nests if you're walking through the bush throughout Australia, can't you?
Simon Robson: Yeah, Australia and South East Asia. There's actually two species of green tree ants, one is in Australia/South East Asia and the other is in Africa.
Robyn Williams: What about your amphibious ant?
Simon Robson: Ah, well there's an amazing ant that lives in tropical Australia, it nests in the mangroves in the mud but it nests below the high tide level, so when the tide comes in the nests are completely submerged by water, and if you go out there you can see ants that perhaps haven't made it back to the nest in time and they'll swim around on the surface of the water - which is incredible for an ant to do.
Robyn Williams: Do they have longer legs, a bit like those waders which manage to skip along because the surface tension of the water allows them to?
Simon Robson: Well, as far as I can work out, no: morphologically they appear to be exactly the same as all the other ants, so it's a behavioural modification of their behaviour. What they do is they stick their back legs out straight, which seems to maintain the surface tension and then the front legs go into a beautiful version of the Australian crawl and they just go screaming across the surface of the water, faster than they can actually run I think. It's quite amazing to watch.
Robyn Williams: Has anyone found swimming ants before, do you know?
Simon Robson: No, no there are some ants that are in the Amazon, for example, when it floods they'll form rafts and float around but there aren't really ants that actually will go onto the surface of the water and swim.
Robyn Williams: It's quite remarkable that they should have chosen such a sort of hazardous place, an intertidal zone, in which to build a nest. You wonder how they got there in the first place.
Simon Robson: Yeah, well they belong to a group of ants that normally nest in the ground, so in a sense they are still nesting in the ground but it's just the ground that gets wet and more frequently because of tides. But it does seem to be a very hazardous place because you go into the mangroves and it's full of crab burrows and things building and constructing their own world, so how a colony survives in there is quite amazing.
Robyn Williams: When did you first come across these?
Simon Robson: I'm looking at nest weaving behaviour within the group called Polyrhachis, of many spines, it's a beautiful genus of ant. Myself and colleagues and friends have been working with me, I'm always keen for them to go out into the crocodile mangrove and mosquito infested mangroves more than I do, but yeah, we have been monitoring and keeping track of them for the last few years.
Robyn Williams: Yeah, you mentioned the Amazon. Has anyone looked in other places to see similar sorts of behaviour elsewhere?
Simon Robson: There are some amazing examples. There's an ant that actually gets into pitcher plants in Borneo and swims into the water and feeds on insects that have fallen into the pitcher plant. Pitcher plants are designed to get insects in and not let them out but this ant somehow not only gets in and forages but then gets out and lives to tell the tale.
Robyn Williams: How many years do ants live?
Simon Robson: Some ants from Queensland will live 20 years, so they are very unusual for insects, and insects that are social tend to live a lot longer than those who are not social, so selection can act on those. And it's very interesting when you look at large colonies that complicate things like green tree ants, or the army ants that are always running through Africa and eating people as they sleep in tents, the individuals that are part of the colony are relatively simple but when you look at an ant that's very small, it might only have a couple of hundred individuals, the individuals tend to be more complicated in a sense that they will do lots of different behaviours. So it seems to be, if you want the system as a whole, the colony to be very efficient the way to do that is you sort of dumb down the individuals that are part of the community.
It's very interesting, social insects have provided a good model for our understanding of robots and robotic systems. For example, if you wanted to go to Mars and know if there's water there, well one way you could do it is you could build one all powerful robot that can look at the world, think about things, decide that might be water, work out how to get there, get to it, sense it, tells you if it's water. But the trouble with that robot is if it gets its legs stuck in a hole as they often seem to do then you're not going anywhere. An alternative suggestion is you build millions of robots that are really cheap, you throw them all over Mars and all they do is that they tell you if they're on water on not. It's a cheaper way of doing it and it sort of has a built in redundancy.
And social insect colonies seem to be organised in the same way so the individuals are relatively simple but as a group they are very intelligent but the intelligence comes not because an individual is smart but because of the way you put them together and the way you interact. And that's very interesting, it's the same as the human brain, no cell in our brain is intelligent but the way the nerves interact give us intelligence. And so people think of the way language develops and the way economies bubbles on and all those sorts of things are systems in which the individual units are not very smart but you put them together and they display some sort of behaviour.
Robyn Williams: It's the numbers that count. Simon Robson at James Cook University in Northern Queensland. One of his close colleagues is Deborah Gordon, who's actually got ants in her office at Stanford.
Deborah Gordon: When I first started working on harvester ants I used to have nightmares after we'd dug up colonies, because you have to dig a pit about two metres deep and get in it with a lot of stinging ants around so we would try to tape up all the openings in our clothes and wear gloves and it's inevitable you get stung and the sting is pretty painful. So I would go to sleep at night with images of thousands of ants.
Pauline Newman: And you've got over that now?
Deborah Gordon: Yeah, I have got over that. You can always tell somebody who does research on ants because they put their socks over the bottom of their trousers, because it's one thing to have an ant on your hand when you can brush it off but it's much more unpleasant to have an ant crawling up your leg when you're wearing trousers.
Robyn Williams: Apart from the hazards, people like Simon Robson and Deborah Gordon study ant colonies with relish because they tell them so much about the evolution of social behaviour. Ants you see are not robots, especially when you look at the colonies as a whole. Pauline Newman visits the Stanford Lab and finds that Professor Gordon, on the whole, prefers larger insects.
Deborah Gordon: I like to look at large ants because I can see them as an animal doing something. If the ant stretches out its abdomen I think it would be about a centimetre or maybe 1.2 centimetres long, so I really chose them because they are big and because they live in the desert where there's light coloured sand and large dark ants and so it's very easy to see them.
Pauline Newman: Scientists have long been fascinated by ants because of the extraordinary way they organise themselves into colonies that display purposeful activity. Individual ants are very limited in their behaviour but collectively it's a different story. Colonies take on a life of their own. Deborah Gordon has spent years studying harvester ant colonies in the Arizona Desert to try and figure out what makes them tick. A typical nest is a labyrinth of chambers forming a metre wide mound around which worker ants forage up to 30 metres away. Deborah and her team dug up a colony and transported it to her lab at Stanford University. The ants' new home is made out of plastic tubes and slippery-sided boxes. Deborah removed the red lid from one of the boxes to show me the ants' most intimate activities.
Deborah Gordon: There's the queen - she just lays the eggs so she's quite a bit larger than the other ants but not huge and she's standing there at the edge of a pile of small larvae being groomed by five or six other workers. The workers do all the work; the workers inside the nest take care of the queen and they take care of the larvae. You see here, that very bright white object is a seed that's been chewed up by the workers and is getting ready to be fed to a larvae .
Pauline Newman: They're moving the larvae around.
Deborah Gordon: That's right, they tend to pile them up by size and I'm encouraged to see all these small ones because these are pretty recent, probably just a week or two old, which means that since the colony's been here in this nest, we just brought this back this summer, she's been laying eggs so I'm glad to see she's happy.
Pauline Newman: So the ants are behaving much as you'd expect them to do in the wild?
Deborah Gordon: Yes, no ant tells another ant what to do, there's nobody in charge, there's no central control. I've been following the same population of about 300 colonies for 20 years and it turns out that an older mature colony acts very differently from a younger one, and what's fascinating about this is that the ants live only a year, yet a six year old colony will behave very differently from a two year old one, and it turns out that the pattern of encounters is what co-ordinates the behaviour of the colony.
Pauline Newman: Ants exchange information when they bump into each other and Deborah thinks the learning pattern of the colony has something to do with the frequency and number of these interactions. Whatever the explanation, it appears that ants belonging to older colonies don't get so agitated when their nest is disturbed. They also seem to adopt a smarter foraging strategy, collecting more food and adapting better to environmental change. And when the colony reaches a certain size it somehow knows that it's time to reproduce.
Deborah Gordon: A new colony is founded by a queen just after she mates and she begins to lay eggs and she goes on laying eggs for 15 or 20 years using the sperm from that original mating. So colonies grow from zero ants, just the founding queen to about 10,000 ants once the colony is five years old and then that's the point at which the colony begins to make reproductives for the annual mating flight. Winged males and virgin queens from all the colonies in the population fly together to one spot and there they mate and then the males die and the queens fly off somewhere else, drop their wings and start digging to make a new colony.
Pauline Newman: One of the baffling things about social insects such as ants is how their co-operative behaviour has evolved. Why do the worker ants devote their lives to serving the queen while forgoing any chance themselves of reproducing? The standard answer to this altruism was proposed many years ago by William Hamilton.
Deborah Gordon: Well, Hamilton's original idea about how altruism, that is workers sterility, could evolve in social insects like ants and bees and wasps was that because males are haploid - they have only one set of chromosomes, and females are diploid it works out that sisters are more closely related to each other than they would be to their own daughters. But that's only true in a system in which the queen, the mother of all the workers mates only once. The sisters must all have the same father in order to be more closely related to each other than they would be to their own daughters. But in a system like this one, which is probably not so uncommon in ants, certainly it doesn't look as though close relatedness among workers accounts for the co-operative behaviour we see now in many thousands of ant species.
Pauline Newman: Recently, Deborah Gordon set out to analyse the relationship between different colonies by studying the ants genes. And she made a startling discovery.
Deborah Gordon: We've discovered first of all a very interesting twist to the mating system in this species. There seems to be two lineages, such that a queen has to mate with a male of the same lineage to make queens and she has to mate with a male of the other lineage to make workers. That means that a queen has to mate at least twice in order to make a viable colony that has both workers and new reproductives to help found new colonies. So every colony is composed of two different distinct lineages and that means that the sisters are not as closely related to each other as we once imagined all ant workers to be.
Pauline Newman: So what does that say about the theory then that ants are so closely related to each other that they needn't bother to reproduce individually, I mean that's gone, hasn't it?
Deborah Gordon: Well, we'll never know if perhaps that explanation does account for the origin of this kind of colony system and that has been lost and it's now maintained for some other reason, or whether that had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Pauline Newman: Are there any other animal examples of this type of social structure where altruism seems to play a part?
Deborah Gordon: There are many examples like termites, bees and wasps and there are even some mammals - there's the naked mole rat in which there seem to be some females who reproduce and others that don't. And there may be many more examples that we don't know about that have this kind of behaviour but don't have that kind of genetic system.
Pauline Newman: Well, we ought to put the cover on because these ants are getting rather agitated, aren't they?
Deborah Gordon: Yes, I don't want the queen to decide to come out. Link...
Senacherib Prism:
Link...
Watch their extra ordinary feat as they cross over the water without fear of the danger waiting ahead: the fish that may devour them, the flow of the currents, and the strong winds that may get them away from safety.
Notice these ants closely as they frantically and decisively working towards their goal… and without being commanded, each one working like a possessed being.
Charles Darwin University researchers say the Territory's much maligned green ants could be the good blokes in disguise when it comes to mango orchards. Sure they bite, but apparently the ants chew on all manner of pests and nasties that do far more damage to the fruit and the trees. Early figures show production in conventional orchards can be boosted by more than 50 per cent and substantially more than that in organic trees. The university's green ant project coordinator Associate Professor Keith Christian told our reporter Jack Ellis the green ants are very effective pest controllers. "If you manage the green ants properly you can use them instead of insecticides to control the pests and increase yield, increase fruit quality, decrease the cost of production and therefore increase profit. They chase down insects and eat them - caterpillars, leaf hoppers, borers, fruit fly, if they don't eat them they chase them away. The advantage with green ants, they're always on the trees. Unless it's really cool they're patrolling 24 hours a day seven days a week."
Ants, particularly green ants, excite Simon Roberts. Sitting under a rubber tree in North Queensland he tells us of their clever architectural and farming skills. He's also discovered ants that swim. Another scientist, who could be called the queen of ant researchers, is Professor Deborah Gordon, who spends her summers in the searing heat of the Arizona desert looking at popultions of a species called harvester ants, and she's made some remarkable discoveries about their behaviour and genetics.
Transcript...
Simon Robson: In the trees is a green tree ant nest and leaves have been pulled together and they've been connected with silk that comes from the larvae and it represents one of the most complex behaviours that socials insects perform and here it is on campus right in front of us, it's quite amazing.
Robyn Williams: Yes, we're sitting under a rubber tree on the campus of James Cook University in Townsville, Simon Robson and I. He's Senior Lecturer in tropical biology there and he's excited about those clever architects and farmers - the green ants. But he's also delighted by his discovery of the ant equivalent of Ian Thorpe who churn up the water. But back to those green ants.
Simon Robson: Well, I guess they're building the nest as a place to live but what I'm interested in as how that behaviour sort of evolved because the nest is made from silk that comes from the larvae. Much as butterflies build cocoons what happens in these ants is that the larvae produce silk. Instead of making a cocoon the workers pick them up and shuttle them around and use them like little sewing machines and they make a nest out of silk and then when the larvae are finished that pupae without making any cocoons at all.
Robyn Williams: And of course you can see green ant nests if you're walking through the bush throughout Australia, can't you?
Simon Robson: Yeah, Australia and South East Asia. There's actually two species of green tree ants, one is in Australia/South East Asia and the other is in Africa.
Robyn Williams: What about your amphibious ant?
Simon Robson: Ah, well there's an amazing ant that lives in tropical Australia, it nests in the mangroves in the mud but it nests below the high tide level, so when the tide comes in the nests are completely submerged by water, and if you go out there you can see ants that perhaps haven't made it back to the nest in time and they'll swim around on the surface of the water - which is incredible for an ant to do.
Robyn Williams: Do they have longer legs, a bit like those waders which manage to skip along because the surface tension of the water allows them to?
Simon Robson: Well, as far as I can work out, no: morphologically they appear to be exactly the same as all the other ants, so it's a behavioural modification of their behaviour. What they do is they stick their back legs out straight, which seems to maintain the surface tension and then the front legs go into a beautiful version of the Australian crawl and they just go screaming across the surface of the water, faster than they can actually run I think. It's quite amazing to watch.
Robyn Williams: Has anyone found swimming ants before, do you know?
Simon Robson: No, no there are some ants that are in the Amazon, for example, when it floods they'll form rafts and float around but there aren't really ants that actually will go onto the surface of the water and swim.
Robyn Williams: It's quite remarkable that they should have chosen such a sort of hazardous place, an intertidal zone, in which to build a nest. You wonder how they got there in the first place.
Simon Robson: Yeah, well they belong to a group of ants that normally nest in the ground, so in a sense they are still nesting in the ground but it's just the ground that gets wet and more frequently because of tides. But it does seem to be a very hazardous place because you go into the mangroves and it's full of crab burrows and things building and constructing their own world, so how a colony survives in there is quite amazing.
Robyn Williams: When did you first come across these?
Simon Robson: I'm looking at nest weaving behaviour within the group called Polyrhachis, of many spines, it's a beautiful genus of ant. Myself and colleagues and friends have been working with me, I'm always keen for them to go out into the crocodile mangrove and mosquito infested mangroves more than I do, but yeah, we have been monitoring and keeping track of them for the last few years.
Robyn Williams: Yeah, you mentioned the Amazon. Has anyone looked in other places to see similar sorts of behaviour elsewhere?
Simon Robson: There are some amazing examples. There's an ant that actually gets into pitcher plants in Borneo and swims into the water and feeds on insects that have fallen into the pitcher plant. Pitcher plants are designed to get insects in and not let them out but this ant somehow not only gets in and forages but then gets out and lives to tell the tale.
Robyn Williams: How many years do ants live?
Simon Robson: Some ants from Queensland will live 20 years, so they are very unusual for insects, and insects that are social tend to live a lot longer than those who are not social, so selection can act on those. And it's very interesting when you look at large colonies that complicate things like green tree ants, or the army ants that are always running through Africa and eating people as they sleep in tents, the individuals that are part of the colony are relatively simple but when you look at an ant that's very small, it might only have a couple of hundred individuals, the individuals tend to be more complicated in a sense that they will do lots of different behaviours. So it seems to be, if you want the system as a whole, the colony to be very efficient the way to do that is you sort of dumb down the individuals that are part of the community.
It's very interesting, social insects have provided a good model for our understanding of robots and robotic systems. For example, if you wanted to go to Mars and know if there's water there, well one way you could do it is you could build one all powerful robot that can look at the world, think about things, decide that might be water, work out how to get there, get to it, sense it, tells you if it's water. But the trouble with that robot is if it gets its legs stuck in a hole as they often seem to do then you're not going anywhere. An alternative suggestion is you build millions of robots that are really cheap, you throw them all over Mars and all they do is that they tell you if they're on water on not. It's a cheaper way of doing it and it sort of has a built in redundancy.
And social insect colonies seem to be organised in the same way so the individuals are relatively simple but as a group they are very intelligent but the intelligence comes not because an individual is smart but because of the way you put them together and the way you interact. And that's very interesting, it's the same as the human brain, no cell in our brain is intelligent but the way the nerves interact give us intelligence. And so people think of the way language develops and the way economies bubbles on and all those sorts of things are systems in which the individual units are not very smart but you put them together and they display some sort of behaviour.
Robyn Williams: It's the numbers that count. Simon Robson at James Cook University in Northern Queensland. One of his close colleagues is Deborah Gordon, who's actually got ants in her office at Stanford.
Deborah Gordon: When I first started working on harvester ants I used to have nightmares after we'd dug up colonies, because you have to dig a pit about two metres deep and get in it with a lot of stinging ants around so we would try to tape up all the openings in our clothes and wear gloves and it's inevitable you get stung and the sting is pretty painful. So I would go to sleep at night with images of thousands of ants.
Pauline Newman: And you've got over that now?
Deborah Gordon: Yeah, I have got over that. You can always tell somebody who does research on ants because they put their socks over the bottom of their trousers, because it's one thing to have an ant on your hand when you can brush it off but it's much more unpleasant to have an ant crawling up your leg when you're wearing trousers.
Robyn Williams: Apart from the hazards, people like Simon Robson and Deborah Gordon study ant colonies with relish because they tell them so much about the evolution of social behaviour. Ants you see are not robots, especially when you look at the colonies as a whole. Pauline Newman visits the Stanford Lab and finds that Professor Gordon, on the whole, prefers larger insects.
Deborah Gordon: I like to look at large ants because I can see them as an animal doing something. If the ant stretches out its abdomen I think it would be about a centimetre or maybe 1.2 centimetres long, so I really chose them because they are big and because they live in the desert where there's light coloured sand and large dark ants and so it's very easy to see them.
Pauline Newman: Scientists have long been fascinated by ants because of the extraordinary way they organise themselves into colonies that display purposeful activity. Individual ants are very limited in their behaviour but collectively it's a different story. Colonies take on a life of their own. Deborah Gordon has spent years studying harvester ant colonies in the Arizona Desert to try and figure out what makes them tick. A typical nest is a labyrinth of chambers forming a metre wide mound around which worker ants forage up to 30 metres away. Deborah and her team dug up a colony and transported it to her lab at Stanford University. The ants' new home is made out of plastic tubes and slippery-sided boxes. Deborah removed the red lid from one of the boxes to show me the ants' most intimate activities.
Deborah Gordon: There's the queen - she just lays the eggs so she's quite a bit larger than the other ants but not huge and she's standing there at the edge of a pile of small larvae being groomed by five or six other workers. The workers do all the work; the workers inside the nest take care of the queen and they take care of the larvae. You see here, that very bright white object is a seed that's been chewed up by the workers and is getting ready to be fed to a larvae .
Pauline Newman: They're moving the larvae around.
Deborah Gordon: That's right, they tend to pile them up by size and I'm encouraged to see all these small ones because these are pretty recent, probably just a week or two old, which means that since the colony's been here in this nest, we just brought this back this summer, she's been laying eggs so I'm glad to see she's happy.
Pauline Newman: So the ants are behaving much as you'd expect them to do in the wild?
Deborah Gordon: Yes, no ant tells another ant what to do, there's nobody in charge, there's no central control. I've been following the same population of about 300 colonies for 20 years and it turns out that an older mature colony acts very differently from a younger one, and what's fascinating about this is that the ants live only a year, yet a six year old colony will behave very differently from a two year old one, and it turns out that the pattern of encounters is what co-ordinates the behaviour of the colony.
Pauline Newman: Ants exchange information when they bump into each other and Deborah thinks the learning pattern of the colony has something to do with the frequency and number of these interactions. Whatever the explanation, it appears that ants belonging to older colonies don't get so agitated when their nest is disturbed. They also seem to adopt a smarter foraging strategy, collecting more food and adapting better to environmental change. And when the colony reaches a certain size it somehow knows that it's time to reproduce.
Deborah Gordon: A new colony is founded by a queen just after she mates and she begins to lay eggs and she goes on laying eggs for 15 or 20 years using the sperm from that original mating. So colonies grow from zero ants, just the founding queen to about 10,000 ants once the colony is five years old and then that's the point at which the colony begins to make reproductives for the annual mating flight. Winged males and virgin queens from all the colonies in the population fly together to one spot and there they mate and then the males die and the queens fly off somewhere else, drop their wings and start digging to make a new colony.
Pauline Newman: One of the baffling things about social insects such as ants is how their co-operative behaviour has evolved. Why do the worker ants devote their lives to serving the queen while forgoing any chance themselves of reproducing? The standard answer to this altruism was proposed many years ago by William Hamilton.
Deborah Gordon: Well, Hamilton's original idea about how altruism, that is workers sterility, could evolve in social insects like ants and bees and wasps was that because males are haploid - they have only one set of chromosomes, and females are diploid it works out that sisters are more closely related to each other than they would be to their own daughters. But that's only true in a system in which the queen, the mother of all the workers mates only once. The sisters must all have the same father in order to be more closely related to each other than they would be to their own daughters. But in a system like this one, which is probably not so uncommon in ants, certainly it doesn't look as though close relatedness among workers accounts for the co-operative behaviour we see now in many thousands of ant species.
Pauline Newman: Recently, Deborah Gordon set out to analyse the relationship between different colonies by studying the ants genes. And she made a startling discovery.
Deborah Gordon: We've discovered first of all a very interesting twist to the mating system in this species. There seems to be two lineages, such that a queen has to mate with a male of the same lineage to make queens and she has to mate with a male of the other lineage to make workers. That means that a queen has to mate at least twice in order to make a viable colony that has both workers and new reproductives to help found new colonies. So every colony is composed of two different distinct lineages and that means that the sisters are not as closely related to each other as we once imagined all ant workers to be.
Pauline Newman: So what does that say about the theory then that ants are so closely related to each other that they needn't bother to reproduce individually, I mean that's gone, hasn't it?
Deborah Gordon: Well, we'll never know if perhaps that explanation does account for the origin of this kind of colony system and that has been lost and it's now maintained for some other reason, or whether that had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Pauline Newman: Are there any other animal examples of this type of social structure where altruism seems to play a part?
Deborah Gordon: There are many examples like termites, bees and wasps and there are even some mammals - there's the naked mole rat in which there seem to be some females who reproduce and others that don't. And there may be many more examples that we don't know about that have this kind of behaviour but don't have that kind of genetic system.
Pauline Newman: Well, we ought to put the cover on because these ants are getting rather agitated, aren't they?
Deborah Gordon: Yes, I don't want the queen to decide to come out. Link...
Senacherib Prism:
Link...
Monday, January 7, 2008
To Love Somebody...
GIVING WITHOUT LOVE?
One thing that will allow you to give what you have is when you’re in-love or you’re loving somebody. The BEST example of the act of giving because of love was already shown in the Bible and it says,
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting
life.” -John 3:16
This act of giving because of love have no criminal intent. Because of love you will give for others to live. You will act as donor with something to give because you know that somebody (acceptor) needs it. And the acceptors’ duty and part to play is to believe and receive your gift.
What will be the reaction and feelings of the donor, and what will happen if the acceptor refused to believe and accept the gift you are giving?
If the part to play by these orphans and elderly were the acceptors, when they refused to believe and accept the gift that you are giving, they may die of thirst, hunger, and sorrows.
Therefore the act of refusing to give (when you have something to give ) when you know that somebody needs it for them to live is an act with criminal intent…
The ULTIMATE act that God may give because of love is to donate or give His only begotten Son for people to live an everlasting life.
We can give cash, foods, used clothes, scraps, prayers, moral supports, blood, body parts and organs, and even our own life all because we love them who need our donations and gifts for them to live a very short life here on earth… Link...
One thing that will allow you to give what you have is when you’re in-love or you’re loving somebody. The BEST example of the act of giving because of love was already shown in the Bible and it says,
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting
life.” -John 3:16
This act of giving because of love have no criminal intent. Because of love you will give for others to live. You will act as donor with something to give because you know that somebody (acceptor) needs it. And the acceptors’ duty and part to play is to believe and receive your gift.
What will be the reaction and feelings of the donor, and what will happen if the acceptor refused to believe and accept the gift you are giving?
If the part to play by these orphans and elderly were the acceptors, when they refused to believe and accept the gift that you are giving, they may die of thirst, hunger, and sorrows.
Therefore the act of refusing to give (when you have something to give ) when you know that somebody needs it for them to live is an act with criminal intent…
The ULTIMATE act that God may give because of love is to donate or give His only begotten Son for people to live an everlasting life.
We can give cash, foods, used clothes, scraps, prayers, moral supports, blood, body parts and organs, and even our own life all because we love them who need our donations and gifts for them to live a very short life here on earth… Link...
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