This is mainly

for the high school students out there who want to make a good impression

during the first few weeks of the new school year.

Science was

never my strong suit, but a few years ago I learned some fascinating things

about ants. It's likely that you have never heard this before, and you

can share something totally new with your class (of course, adults can

impress their friends with this as well).

Here's a condensed

version of some basic information about ants, taken from a Web site at

the University of Arizona, entitled "Adult Males and Females."

When ant colonies reproduce, the

new queens and males may be found in the colony. These are "flying

ants" and have two pairs of wings.

Males generally

have small heads, large eyes, large thoraces, and a pair of claspers at

the end of the gaster. Once they fly (and mate), males do not live very

long.

After mating,

new queens break off their wings and never fly again. Without wings, they

can generally be distinguished from workers by their larger body size,

larger thorax and larger abdomen.

All workers

are females.

That last sentence

is the most important one. Most of us who have had the most basic science

classes in high school and college (that would definitely include me)

have heard about the dominance of female ants over males. I don't know

exactly when this first became accepted as fact by the scientific community,

but given the size of an ant, it makes sense that it has been since the

advent of the microscope, which has been within the past 300 or so years.

Now go back

about 3,000 years, to the book of Proverbs, the sixth chapter, verses

6-8:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard;

consider her ways, and be wise:

Which having

no guide, overseer, or ruler,

Provideth

her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

At first glance,

some people might say, "So? There are verses about ants in the Bible.

Big deal." But look at how the ants in these verses are identified.

There has been

a bit of controversy in recent months over a new translation of the Bible

which removes virtually every reference to gender. It has been well-received

in some circles and highly criticized in others.

Part of the

motivation for creating this new translation was the long-standing allegation

that the Bible has always been sexist. Of course, that is a pile of garbage,

but a look at the use of gender-specific language in the King James Version,

which I have quoted here, is relevant to our discussion.

The pronouns

she and her are used 2,442 times in the entire Bible, according

to a search engine at bible.com. The pronouns he , him and

his are used 21,182 times. That's a huge difference, which some

might say fuels the gender discrimination argument.

But if you

believe that every word in the Bible is important, or even if you don't,

you can easily gather from these numbers that whenever a female pronoun

is used in the Bible, it is used intentionally. That brings us