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[ti:Instinct or Cleverness?]
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[00:01.48]Lesson 54
[00:04.04]Instinct or cleverness?
[00:13.23]Was the writer successful in protecting his peach tree? Why not?
[00:20.96]We have been brought up to fear insects.
[00:24.13]We regard them as unnecessary creatures that do more harm than good.
[00:29.16]We continually wage war on them, for they contaminate our food, carry diseases, or devour our crops.
[00:36.88]They sting or bite without provocation;
[00:40.03]they fly uninvited into our rooms on summer nights, or beat against our lighted windows.
[00:46.97]We live in dread not only of unpleasant insects like spiders or wasps, but of quite harmless ones like moths.
[00:55.99]Reading about them increases our understanding without dispelling our fears.
[01:01.29]Knowing that the industrious ant lives in a highly organized society
[01:05.99]does nothing to prevent us from being filled with revulsion when we find hordes of them crawling over a carefully prepared picnic lunch.
[01:15.38]No matter how much we like honey,
[01:17.65]or how much we have read about the uncanny sense of direction which bees possess, we have a horror of being stung.
[01:26.20]Most of our fears are unreasonable, but they are impossible to erase.
[01:31.89]At the same time, however, insects are strangely fascinating.