Worker (organism)

“ But the difference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest is one of degree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labor is carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are competent to perform all functions, and one and the same portion of protoplasm may successively take on the function of feeding, moving, or reproducing apparatus. ”

“ It is also well established that leaf ants breed edible fungi inside anthills in Brazil. The extensive cooperation and complex division of labour in social insects are, again, known to everyone; true, the division of labour there is mainly "physiological", that is, directly related to the special structure of the organism of different groups - workers, soldiers, etc . ”

“ Just as in a workshop, in the production of an article, one machine prepares the material for another, and one workman transfers to another material which is finished up to a certain degree, so do the tissue cells mutually support each other in their task. The cells of the gut and the liver continually act as important sorters for the whole organism. ”

“ As we look higher in the scale of life, we invariably find that certain parts of a plant or animal are set apart to do certain work, and only that work. Just as in a community of people, there are some men who do rough manual work, others who are skilled workmen, some who are shopkeepers, and still others who are professional [Pg 179] men, so among plants and animals, wherever collections of cells live together to form an organism, there is division of labor, some cells being fitted to do one kind of work, while others are fitted to do work of another sort. ”

“ The labourer who feels little and thinks less, has the digestion of an ostrich; while the non-worker is never allowed to forget that he has a stomach, and is obliged to watch every mouthful that he eats. ”

“ In this way, there is a division of labor, such that all the external cells protect not only themselves, but the whole [Pg 44] organism; while the internal cells absorb nutriment not only for themselves but for the others. This is the simplest example of a process that becomes more and more complex in the formation of higher organisms; in adapting themselves to their work, the cells become greatly modified (formation of tissues) and perform services that are useful to the entire organism. ”

“ If we regard the variation of the many determinants concerned in the transformation of the female into the sterile worker as having come about through the gradual transformation of the ids into worker-ids, we shall see that the germ-plasm of the sexual ants must contain three kinds of ids, male, female, and worker ids, or if the workers have diverged into soldiers and nest-builders, then four kinds. ”

“ In the case of bone-cells, one of the products of disruption is of permanent use to the organism, and constitutes the solid framework of the skeleton. In the case of the secreting cells of the salivary and other digestive glands, one of the disruptive products is of temporary value for the preparation of the food. It is exceedingly probable that these useful products of disruption, permanent or temporary, took their origin in waste products for which natural selection has found a use, and which have been, through natural selection, rendered more and more efficacious. ”

“ In the same manner, the cells united in an organism share among them the labor of fight for existence of the whole organism; they magnify the power of one capacity, and weaken another, and unite in one organ, in order the better to supply the requirements of the whole organism. And exactly in the same manner as with gregarious animals,—ants or bees,—the separate individuals divide the labor among them. ”

“ In unicellular animals we also find division of labour and its accompanying morphological differentiation, but here there is no subdivision of the protoplasm of the organism into the semi-autonomous units which so greatly facilitate division of labour in the Metazoa; instead, division of labour must be between different regions of protoplasm in the single cell. ”

“ There can be little doubt but that if any worker, with moderate instrumental means, but with an observant mind, were to set determinately to work at the study of the commonest weed or the most familiar insect, he, or she, would by patient labour accomplish work which would not only be of value to science, but would redound to the credit of the worker. ”

“ This stupendous labour of construction and provisioning, this labour that absorbs the insect's whole life, is the work of the mother only, who wears herself out at her task. The father, intoxicated with sunlight, lies idle on the threshold of the workshop, watching the heroic female at her work, and regards himself as excused from all labour when he has plagued his neighbours a little.
Does he never perform useful work? Why does he not follow the example of the swallows, each of whom brings a fair share of the straw and mortar for the building of the nest and the midges for the young brood? ”

“ Some are carriers, bringing food materials to the tissues and organs or conveying waste and morbid matter to the excretory channels of the body. Other cells manufacture chemical substances, such as sugar, fats, ferments, hormones etc., for the production of which man requires complicated factories. Still others act as policemen and soldiers which protect the commonwealth against bacteria, parasites and other hostile invaders. ”

“ Thereafter the queen mother, having reared her retinue, worked no more, but kept the hive and produced worker eggs as new cells were provided for them, now and then perhaps feeding the children when the workers were busiest. ”

“ The one essential thing is that all the members of society work, just as in the individual organism all the cells perform their different functions, more or less modest in appearance—for example, the nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells—but all biological functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to the life of the organism as a whole. ”

“ Emery explains this polymorphism by attributing it to the general laws of growth in the insect organism under the influence of different external stimuli. He thinks that 'the production of workers depends upon a special capacity of the germplasm to respond to the abundance or scantiness of certain nutritive materials by a greater [Pg 130] growth of certain parts of the body, and a lesser growth of other parts. Workers' food stimulates growth in the jaws and brain, retards growth in the wings and sexual cells. ”

“ Workmen, that are exposed to animal dust, as furriers, saddlers, brushmakers, fall prey to consumption much oftener than those, that fulfill their vocation in air pregnant with vegetable dust. According to statistics workingmen are stricken with pulmonary consumption as follows: of glass workers 80 per cent., needle grinders 70, filemakers 62, stone cutters 40, mill grinders, lithographers, cigarmakers, brushmakers, stone-polishers 40–50, millers 10, coal workers 1 per cent. ”

“ Thus I think I made out that the soldier and worker castes are, like the males and females, distinct from the egg; they are not made so by a difference of food or treatment during their earlier stages, and they never become winged insects. The workers and soldiers feed on decayed wood and other vegetable substances ”

“ The complex, the extraordinarily complex, behaviour of the worker-bees on any interpretation is still mysterious. This interpretation can be tested only by a reference to the life-history of other social-bees which have attained to a less complexity. This shows us that the sterile worker is not to be regarded as a newly-evolved type so much as an arrested stage of a more complete ancestral condition, and the fact that the worker is potentially a queen is further evidence of this. ”

“ The fact that the cells which are out of harmony with the body are dependent upon nutritive material of the most varied nature for the opportunity of extending their existence, and more particularly for maintaining their species, gives us an insight into the kind of influence exercised by these parasites on the host. ”

“ If the community undertakes its own selection we can dispense with the selecting influence of the micro-organism of whooping-cough, scarlet fever, or tubercle. Our remedies and our digested foods may be used with advantage to help the members of a robust and energetic stock through those dangers which must at all times beset them. ”

“ As a matter of fact, between 1910 and 1930 the farm worker's productivity increased more rapidly than that of the industrial worker. But the results in medicine have been the most striking in the field of biological control. ”

“ Employers shall, at their own expense, provide and maintain for the use of the workers, overalls or clothing for use during work only, in addition to gloves and respirators.
10. In a part of the building separated from the workrooms, there shall be provided for the use of the workers exposed to lead dust or fumes, a cloak room and lavatory kept in good order, provided with basins or taps in sufficient number, a plentiful supply of water, soap and a towel for each worker replaced at least once a week. ”

“ The invisible stories of furnaces and machines, burrowing deep into the earth, where grimy workmen are heavily laboring.
The many-windowed stories of little homes and shelters and sleeping-places, reaching up into the night like some miraculous, high-piled honey-comb of wax-white cells.
The clothes inside of the cells—the stuffs, the silks, the laces; the elaborate delicate disguises that wait in trunks and drawers and closets, or bedrape and conceal human flesh. ”

“ Only here the economy finds expression in division of labour, not in space, but in time. The work of the self-propagating chromatin granules is so ordered that periods of undisturbed metabolic activity alternate with periods of reproductive activity. The brief space of time occupied by the latter process has necessitated a more elaborate specialization of the forces—whatever their nature—controlling cell-division; a specialization which has resulted, just as a similar specialization in so many other cases has resulted, in a visible differentiation of the cell-protoplasm. ”

“ But in the economy of nature the products of explosion are often utilized, and in the division of labour among cells the explosions of some of them are directed specially to the production of substances which shall be of permanent or temporary use—for digestion, as in the products of the salivary, gastric, and intestinal glands; for support, as in bone, cartilage, and skeletal tissue generally; or as a store of nutriment, in fat or yolk. The constructive products of protoplasmic activity seem for the most part to be lodged in the spaces between the network of formative protoplasm. ”

“ The workers die suddenly. They come to the surface, slip down, fall on their backs and rise no more, as if they were struck by lightning. They have had their day; they are slain by age, that merciless poison. Even so does a piece of clockwork become motionless when its mainspring has unwound its last spiral.
The workers are old: but the mothers are the last to be born into the nest, and have all the vigour of youth. ”

“ An organization of a lower order of individuals than these human organizations is to be found in a hive of bees. This is made up of the individual bees, and these, in carrying on the general work of the hive, are known to practice the division of labor. ”

“ The variety and complexity of the chemical transformations which microbes effect in the soil and in the water are but just becoming evident. But we already know that through the vast reaches of time which their life history covers the delicate work which they have to do has been intricately apportioned among them, and a most elaborate physiological division of labor adjusted. The struggle for existence among these lowly forms of life is so keen that they are almost always confined to their legitimate haunts and to their beneficent offices. ”

“ Somewhere along the River, down past the Pool, the Death Maker has a laboratory—a germ-farm crawling alive with all the most hideous disease cultures you can think of. The maker of death has cultivated enough sudden death in this germ-farm to wipe out London in a night, and all Britain in a week. ”

“ The rush of work, noise, dust, heat, and overcrowding of modern industry make it important to have positive evidence that we have successfully adapted ourselves to these new conditions. Only by measuring the effects of these environmental forces upon our bodies can we prevent some trifling physical flaw from developing into a chronic or acute condition. As labor becomes more and more highly specialized, the body of the laborer is forced to readapt itself. The kind of work a man does determines which organs shall claim more than their share of blood and energy. ”

“ We may notice, in the first place, that in the arts there are several industries which may properly be classed together as maceration industries, all of which are based upon the decomposition powers of bacteria. Hardly any animal or vegetable substance is able to resist their softening influence, and the artisan relies upon this power in several different directions. ”

“ Still, as it never occurs to the cultivator to infect the worms directly by giving them food charged with corpusculous débris, it might be asked how, in the industrial establishments, such results can be produced. ”