The gang members of a bygone era also had their leaders, bullies, jokers, and nerds. Each individual had taken up a position in the superorganism’s unfolding structure. And each had shaped his personality to fit the spot in which he landed.

Among humans, groups have all too often been the prime movers. It is their competition that has driven us on the inexorable track toward higher degrees of order. This is one key to the Lucifer Principle.

We must build a picture of the human soul that works. Not a romantic vision that Nature will take us in her arms and save us from ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. We need to stare directly into Nature’s bloody face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason. And we must

William Buckley, the archconservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a highly credentialed liberal, were arguing one day on Buckley’s TV show about America’s budget deficits. They disagreed about nearly everything. The one notion they concurred on enthusiastically was that bureaucratic agencies—such as government departments—mindlessly and inexorably

But the gazelle who has just spotted the clawed creature does not quietly blend into the bunch. She breaks into a strange run punctuated by abrupt jumps into the air. Her behavior alerts her herd-mates to the prowling cat. One after another, they join the running and jumping. The leopard, thrown off by the commotion, eventually gives up and walks

A conventional computer also stores a sizable batch of information in a kind of holding pen but has to shoot it, one small bit at a time, through a processor where the real work of computation and comparison is accomplished. This is called serial processing. Neural nets function in a radically different way. They don’t use the narrow,

Some of these Hymenoptera are lazy and sit around all day doing very little; others work their tails off in the interest of the community. But try separating the ne’er-do-wells from the industrious and setting them up as two new colonies—one composed exclusively of layabouts and the other made up entirely of nose-to-the-grindstone types. A strange

Stress is not a product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary.

host of other studies have shown the same thing: babies can be given food, shelter, warmth, and hygiene, but if they are not held and stroked, they have an abnormal tendency to die.