Slime had they for mortar

“And slime had they for mortar” Genesis 11:3

The last blog post was about a major transition in evolution, the origin of social insect colonies, in which individual ants and bees work together to make up something like a superorganism. Around the same time that this was happening we find evidence for another venture in higher-level evolution, the slime molds. (The evidence is in the form of a recently discovered 100 million year old fossil, although slime molds were probably around long before this.)

John Tyler Bonner, who died in 2019, spent 70 years of a very long life studying cellular slime molds. Here are some weirdly beautiful movies he made. Cellular slime molds switch between being single cell organisms and multicellular organisms. Most of the time they live alone, looking and acting much like non-social amoebae. But when times get tough, and local food resources are exhausted, the cells start sending out chemical signals indicating they are ready to shift to another state. Individual cells aggregate to form a mass, which is capable of moving around, seeking out new food sources, even learning. (In cellular slime molds, cells retain their identity as separate cells. In plasmodial slime molds, the cells merge to form one super cell.) The mass may raise up a fruiting body atop a stem. The spores in the fruiting body may blow away, perhaps being carried some distance to a better home, where the survivors disperse and feast as the cycle begins again. There is an interesting sociobiological puzzle here: the cells forming the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the sake of the spore cells. This is probably an instance of kin selection.

Both social insects and slime molds may carry lessons for human social life, which, on a large scale, is radically different from the social life of our primate near relations. Both social insects and humans commonly build enormous social organizations with high levels of cooperation. These organizations are too large for their members to recognize one another as individuals. Instead they rely on signals to show others that they are the right sort. With social insects, these are mostly chemical signals. With humans these are the various insignia – letters of commission, uniforms, shibboleths, etc. – that mark the bearer as the occupant of a particular social role, independently of his personal character. (“You salute the uniform, not the man.”) For more on this topic, check out Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.

And, as with slime molds, humans seem to go through characteristic alternations in their social lives, on a time scale of multiple generations. With slime molds there is an alternation between solitary and social phases. With humans there is an alternation between phases of lesser and greater social solidarity (asabiya). Borrowing from Max Weber, we might call this an alternation between routine and charisma. In phases of routine, people learn the rules of their society, and do their best to get ahead by following the rules, or working around them. But in times of crisis, the old ways no longer serve. While slime molds secrete pheromones to instigate aggregation in hard times, humans secrete cosmologies. Prophets arise, with visions of a new order, taking their cues from divine visions, or the Book of Daniel or Revelations, or theories of political economy or race science. The great majority of such projects are stillborn, but occasionally one succeeds, subduing doubters and infidels, overthrowing the established order or leading a chosen people to a new land. The world we live in – the civilizational landscape of Eurasia, the cultural geography of the United States (I write this in Salt Lake City, Utah) – is in some degree the legacy of such projects.

The quotation above from Genesis 11:3 was used by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in the early years of the Cold War, still worth reading today.

Related, here’s me on the sociobiology of “ethnic group selection.”

Consider her ways

99.9 – 95.6 million years ago.

Here is my obituary for Ed Wilson (1929 – 2021) and below some thoughts about ants.

There are some pieces of paleontology that really stand out in the popular imagination. Dinosaurs are so cool that even if they hadn’t existed we would have invented them. (Maybe we did, in the form of dragons. And look ahead (or back) to early April for the dinosaur-griffin connection.) Also, as I suggested in a previous post, transitions from one form of locomotion to another – flightless dinosaurs to birds, fish to tetrapods, land mammals to whales – really grab the imagination (and annoy creationists) because the largest and most distinctive named folk categories of animals (snakes, fish, birds) are built around modes of locomotion.

Evolutionary biologists tend to see things differently. Turning fins into legs, legs into wings, and legs back into flippers is pretty impressive. But the really major evolutionary transitions involve the evolution of whole new levels of organization: the origin of the eukaryotic cell, for example, and the origin of multicellular life. From this perspective, the really huge change in the Mesozoic – sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs – is the origin of eusociality among insects like ants and bees. An ant nest or a bee hive is something like a single superorganism, with most of its members sterile workers striving – even committing suicide — for the colony’s reproduction, not their own. (100 million years ago – corresponding to March 28 in Logarithmic History — is when we find the first bee and ant fossils, but the transition must have been underway before that time.)

Certainly the statistics on social insects today are impressive.

The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. … In one Amazon site, two German researchers … found that ants and termites together compose almost two-thirds of the weight of all the insects. Eusocial bees and wasps added another tenth. Ants alone weighed four times more than all the terrestrial vertebrates – that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. E. O. Wilson pp 110-113

E. O. Wilson, world’s foremost authority on ants, and one of the founders of sociobiology, thinks that the origin of insect eusociality might have lessons for another major evolutionary transition, the origin of humans (and of human language, technology, culture, and complex social organization). In his book The Social Conquest of Earth he argues that a key step in both sets of transitions was the development of a valuable and defensible home – in the case of humans, a hearth site. Wilson returns to this argument in his recent book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Human Societies. On the same topic, Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm: How Human Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall,  asks how it is that we somehow rival the social insects in our scale of organization.

One trait found in both ants and humans is large-scale warfare. Wilson gives an idea of the nature of ant warfare in fictional form in his novel Anthill. It’s an interesting experiment, but also disorienting. Because individual recognition is not important for ants, his story of the destruction of an ant colony reads like the Iliad with all the personal names taken out. But Homer’s heroes fought for “aphthiton kleos,” undying fame (and got some measure of it in Homer’s poem). The moral economy of reputation puts human cooperation in war and peace on a very different footing from insect eusociality. (Here’s my take on “ethnic group selection,” which depends on social enforcement, perhaps via reputation.)

“Consider her ways” is the title of a short story by John Wyndham, about a woman from the present trapped in a future ant-like all-female dystopia. It was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title is from Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”

Other science fiction authors have taken a cheerier view of a world without men.

Life goes nuclear

2.06 – 1.95 Gya

Eukaryotic cells (Domain Eucaryota, which includes multicellular life, like plants, animals, and fungi) are, on average, much larger and more complex than the earlier evolved prokaryote cells (Domains Bacteria and Archaea*). They have organelles, including mitochondria that power them and chloroplasts (at least among plants) that carry out photosynthesis. Their DNA is stored in a nucleus, and consists not just of genes (as in prokaryotes), but of large stretches of non-coding DNA (most of their genome), separating pieces of genes. The ancestor of present-day eukaryotes reproduced sexually, although some eukaryotes have since given up sex.

There are different ways that life increases in complexity. The origin of the Eucarya has something in common with a much later event, the origin of agriculture (check out September 11 on logarithmichistory). Starting 10,000 years ago, we Homo sapiens brought other animals and plants under our control, managing their reproduction, and selecting them (first unintentionally, then intentionally) to suit our purposes, until now most domesticated creatures couldn’t survive in the wild. Our own numbers and social scale increased enormously with the rise of agriculture.

At least 2 billion years ago, an archaeon cell gobbled up one or more bacterial cells (or was parasitized by them). The bacteria ended up surviving inside it, and after many generations became a kind of domesticate inside their host. Eukaryotes do domestication one better than humans: they carry their livestock inside their bodies. Eventually this domesticate evolved into mitochondria, the little power packs that pump out ATP for the rest of the cell to use as as an energy source. Over the course of time all but a small fraction of the original bacterial genome was moved into the nucleus.

In the last few years we have come closer to understanding how this momentous step occurred: we have discovered a new branch of the Archaean tree, the Asgard archaea. The Asgard archaeans carry some genes otherwise found only in eukaryotes, and it looks likely the first eukaryote to start hosting the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria was either an Asgarder, or close branch. Just recently we finally succeeded in cultivating these creatures in the lab. (It was hard to do.) They are tiny little spheres with long filaments protruding from them. The partnership between Archaeans and bacteria may have begun with bacteria nestling in these protrusions.

Humans developed agriculture multiple times independently around the world. As far as we know, eukaryotes evolved only once, long after the origin of simpler forms. The evolution of eukaryotes might be very unlikely to occur during the habitable lifespan of a planet. The observable universe may be full of bacteria, but harbor more complex cells only sparsely.

* Domain Archaea, a billions-of-years-old group of single-celled organisms looking like bacteria but biochemically different, should not be confused with the Archaean Eon, a billions-of-years-long stretch of Earth history.

Speech sounds

Below are some reflections on language. There will be plenty more in days to come. For a science-fictional take on language, try Octavia Butler’s account of a world where language has disappeared, Speech Sounds. It’s one of her best. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award for best short story in 1984.

We’re now just past six months through the year 2018 at Logarithmic History. We raced through time at the rate of 754 million years a day on January 1. December 31 we’ll cover just one year (the year 2020) per day. Today, July 4, covers 24,535 years, from 449,284 to 424,749 years ago.

By today’s date, the universe is a lot more complicated than when we started. As we mentioned before, one of the major sources of complexity is the origin of new discrete combinatorial systems, made of small units that can be combined into larger units that have different properties than their constituents. Elementary particles are the first discrete combinatorial system to appear, already present in the early moments of the Big Bang. The different chemical elements are another major discrete combinatorial system. It took billions of years for enough heavy atoms, beyond hydrogen and helium, to accumulate from stellar explosions, allowing the complex chemistry and geology that we know on Earth. It may be that the paucity of heavy elements in the early Universe is what prevented earlier planetary systems from developing complex life.

With the origin of life comes another discrete combinatorial systems, or rather two connected systems: nucleotides strung together to make genes, which code for amino acids strung together to make proteins.

For the second half of the Logarithmic History year, we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the consequences of another discrete combinatorial system: language. Or maybe, as with genes-and-proteins there are really two systems here: words strung into phrases and sentences, and concepts strung together into complex propositions in a Language of Thought.

The origin of modern human is one of the major transitions in evolution, comparable to the origin of eukaryotic cells, or of social insects. Language is crucial here: slime molds and ants organize high levels of cooperation, turning themselves into “superorganisms,” by secreting pheromones. Humans organize by secreting cosmologies.

Consider her ways

98.6 – 93.3 million years ago.

Here is my obituary for Ed Wilson, who died last year, and below some thoughts about ants.

There are some pieces of paleontology that really stand out in the popular imagination. Dinosaurs are so cool that even if they hadn’t existed we would have invented them. (Maybe we did, in the form of dragons. And look ahead (or back) to early April for the dinosaur-griffin connection.) Also, as I suggested in a previous post, transitions from one form of locomotion to another – flightless dinosaurs to birds, fish to tetrapods, land mammals to whales – really grab the imagination (and annoy creationists) because the largest and most distinctive named folk categories of animals (snakes, fish, birds) are built around modes of locomotion.

Evolutionary biologists tend to see things differently. Turning fins into legs, legs into wings, and legs back into flippers is pretty impressive. But the really major evolutionary transitions involve the evolution of whole new levels of organization: the origin of the eukaryotic cell, for example, and the origin of multicellular life. From this perspective, the really huge change in the Mesozoic – sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs – is the origin of eusociality among insects like ants and bees. An ant nest or a bee hive is something like a single superorganism, with most of its members sterile workers striving – even committing suicide — for the colony’s reproduction, not their own. (100 million years ago – corresponding to March 29 in Logarithmic History — is when we find the first bee and ant fossils, but the transition must have been underway before that time.)

Certainly the statistics on social insects today are impressive.

The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. … In one Amazon site, two German researchers … found that ants and termites together compose almost two-thirds of the weight of all the insects. Eusocial bees and wasps added another tenth. Ants alone weighed four times more than all the terrestrial vertebrates – that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. E. O. Wilson pp 110-113

E. O. Wilson, world’s foremost authority on ants, and one of the founders of sociobiology, thinks that the origin of insect eusociality might have lessons for another major evolutionary transition, the origin of humans (and of human language, technology, culture, and complex social organization). In his book The Social Conquest of Earth he argues that a key step in both sets of transitions was the development of a valuable and defensible home – in the case of humans, a hearth site. Wilson returns to this argument in his book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Human Societies, just published, which I’ll get around to saying more about here eventually. On the same topic, Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm: How Human Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall,  asks how it is that we somehow rival the social insects in our scale of organization.

One trait found in both ants and humans is large-scale warfare. Wilson gives an idea of the nature of ant warfare in fictional form in his novel Anthill. It’s an interesting experiment, but also disorienting. Because individual recognition is not important for ants, his story of the destruction of an ant colony reads like the Iliad with all the personal names taken out. But Homer’s heroes fought for “aphthiton kleos,” undying fame (and got some measure of it in Homer’s poem). The moral economy of reputation puts human cooperation in war and peace on a very different footing from insect eusociality. (Here’s my take on “ethnic group selection,” which depends on social enforcement, perhaps via reputation.)

“Consider her ways” is the title of a short story by John Wyndham, about a woman from the present trapped in a future ant-like all-female dystopia. It was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title is from Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”

Life goes nuclear

2.16 – 2.06 Gya

We’re now doing history at the rate of 100 million years a day.

Eukaryotic cells (Domain Eucaryota, which includes multicellular life, like plants, animals, and fungi) are, on average, much larger and more complex than the earlier evolved prokaryote cells (Domains Bacteria and Archaea*). They have organelles, including mitochondria that power them and chloroplasts (at least among plants) that carry out photosynthesis. Their DNA is stored in a nucleus, and consists not just of genes (as in prokaryotes), but of large stretches of non-coding DNA (most of their genome), separating pieces of genes. The ancestor of present-day eukaryotes reproduced sexually, although some eukaryotes have since given up sex.

There are different ways that life increases in complexity. The origin of the Eucarya has something in common with a much later event, the origin of agriculture (check out September 11 on logarithmichistory). Starting 10,000 years ago, we Homo sapiens brought other animals and plants under our control, managing their reproduction, and selecting them (first unintentionally, then intentionally) to suit our purposes, until now most domesticated creatures couldn’t survive in the wild. Our own numbers and social scale increased enormously with the rise of agriculture.

At least 2 billion years ago, an archaeon cell gobbled up one or more bacterial cells (or was parasitized by them). The bacteria ended up surviving inside it, and after many generations became a kind of domesticate inside their host. Eukaryotes do domestication one better than humans: they carry their livestock inside their bodies. Eventually this domesticate evolved into mitochondria, the little power packs that pump out ATP for the rest of the cell to use as as an energy source. Over the course of time all but a small fraction of the original bacterial genome was moved into the nucleus.

In the last few years we have come closer to understanding how this momentous step occurred: we have discovered a new branch of the Archaean tree, the Asgard archaea. The Asgard archaeans carry some genes otherwise found only in eukaryotes, and it looks likely the first eukaryote to start hosting the bacterial ancestors of mitochondria was either an Asgarder, or close branch. Just recently we finally succeeded in cultivating these creatures in the lab. (It was hard to do.) They are tiny little spheres with long filaments protruding from them. The partnership between Archaeans and bacteria may have begun with bacteria nestling in these protrusions.

Humans developed agriculture multiple times independently around the world. As far as we know, eukaryotes evolved only once, long after the origin of simpler forms. The evolution of eukaryotes might be a very unlikely chance event. The observable universe may be full of bacteria, but harbor more complex cells only sparsely.

* Domain Archaea, a billions-of-years-old group of single-celled organisms looking like bacteria but biochemically different, should not be confused with the Archaean Eon, a billions-of-years-long stretch of Earth history.

Speech sounds

Below are some reflections on language. There will be plenty more in days to come. For a science-fictional take on language, try Octavia Butler’s account of a world where language has disappeared, Speech Sounds. It’s one of her best. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award for best short story in 1984.

We’re now just past six months through the year 2018 at Logarithmic History. We raced through time at the rate of 754 million years a day on January 1. December 31 we’ll cover just one year (the year 2020) per day. Today, July 4, covers 24,535 years, from 449,284 to 424,749 years ago.

By today’s date, the universe is a lot more complicated than when we started. As we mentioned before, one of the major sources of complexity is the origin of new discrete combinatorial systems, made of small units that can be combined into larger units that have different properties than their constituents. Elementary particles are the first discrete combinatorial system to appear, already present in the early moments of the Big Bang. The different chemical elements are another major discrete combinatorial system. It took billions of years for enough heavy atoms, beyond hydrogen and helium, to accumulate from stellar explosions, allowing the complex chemistry and geology that we know on Earth. It may be that the paucity of heavy elements in the early Universe is what prevented earlier planetary systems from developing complex life.

With the origin of life comes another discrete combinatorial systems, or rather two connected systems: nucleotides strung together to make genes, which code for amino acids strung together to make proteins.

For the second half of the Logarithmic History year, we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the consequences of another discrete combinatorial system: language. Or maybe, as with genes-and-proteins there are really two systems here: words strung into phrases and sentences, and concepts strung together into complex propositions in a Language of Thought.

The origin of modern human is one of the major transitions in evolution, comparable to the origin of eukaryotic cells, or of social insects. Language is crucial here: slime molds and ants organize high levels of cooperation, turning themselves into “superorganisms,” by secreting pheromones. Humans organize by secreting cosmologies.

Mammals squared

In a previous post, we summed up what makes mammals special: not a single trait, but a general trend.

[T]he over-arching attribute manifested by the origin of the mammals is increasing homeostatic ability: the maintenance of a constant internal environment in the face of a fluctuating external environment, by means of high-energy regulatory processes.

(Kemp p. 18)

The same trend continues, even further, in hominin evolution. Humans are mammals squared.

Some parallels below, for particular traits.

	Mammals (vs. reptiles)	Hominins (vs. apes)
Energy budget	High basal metabolic rate (BMR) allows sustained aerobic activity	Typical mammal BMR, but higher total metabolism. External energy (fire) for higher total energy.
Rate of food collection	High rate of food collection	Higher rate of food collection. Ecological engineering.
Mechanical processing of food	Complex dentition	Tools to chop, grind, mash food, allowing reduced dentition
Energy for processing food	Higher metabolism means more energy for digestion	Fire means cooking
Energetic investment in young	Mothers do gestation, lactation, infant care	Others give mothers & young extra food and support
Body covering for thermoregulation, adornment	Fur	Clothing
Posture	Limbs under body, sustained high speeds	Bipedalism, endurance running
Brain size	Large brains	Ginormous brains
Behavior	Learning, social learning, play	Shared intentions, cumulative culture, language, imagined worlds
Social organiztion	(Some) complex social organization, recognize individuals, others’ social relationships	(Some) enormous organized social groups,  roles, norms, social scripts
Time scale (years)	100 millions	Millions

Interesting parallels. But the last line of the chart show a striking difference. Mammals developed their special way of life over hundreds of millions of years, hominins over just millions. The triumph of mammals was a triumph of biological evolution that required the slow coordinated evolution of a complex of traits. The triumph of hominins over millions of years was (largely) a triumph of cultural evolution: some somatic adaptation, and a lot more extra somatic.

Age of mammals

Linnaeus chose one trait – mammary glands / lactation – to define the order Mammalia. This was not a purely scientific decision. Like many authorities in eighteenth century Europe, he was concerned that the common practice of wet-nursing was unnatural and dangerous, and he wrote a pamphlet urging the advantages of women nursing their own infants.

But mammals do not owe their Cenozoic success to any one trait. True, there is a central theme in mammalian evolution.

[T]he over-arching attribute manifested by the origin of the mammals is increasing homeostatic ability: the maintenance of a constant internal environment in the face of a fluctuating external environment, by means of high-energy regulatory processes (Kemp p. 18)

But this homeostatic ability is supported by a whole series of interrelated traits that evolved in tandem. Here’s a summary diagram. 

Evolving a whole set of coordinated traits like this is a much slower business than optimizing a single trait. It is a matter of correlated evolution, in which small changes in one character allow for small changes in other characters, along an “adaptive ridge.”

It took several hundred million years, from synapsids, to therapsids, to cynodonts, to mammals, to put the mammalian package together. And even after mammals had appeared and begun to diversify, it would take an extraordinary catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous before the Age of Mammals would really begin.

For an excellent popular introduction, try I Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals

Consider her ways

98.6 – 93.3 million years ago.

Here is my obituary for Ed Wilson, who died last year, and below some thoughts about ants.

There are some pieces of paleontology that really stand out in the popular imagination. Dinosaurs are so cool that even if they hadn’t existed we would have invented them. (Maybe we did, in the form of dragons. And look ahead (or back) to early April for the dinosaur-griffin connection.) Also, as I suggested in a previous post, transitions from one form of locomotion to another – flightless dinosaurs to birds, fish to tetrapods, land mammals to whales – really grab the imagination (and annoy creationists) because the largest and most distinctive named folk categories of animals (snakes, fish, birds) are built around modes of locomotion.

Evolutionary biologists tend to see things differently. Turning fins into legs, legs into wings, and legs back into flippers is pretty impressive. But the really major evolutionary transitions involve the evolution of whole new levels of organization: the origin of the eukaryotic cell, for example, and the origin of multicellular life. From this perspective, the really huge change in the Mesozoic – sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs – is the origin of eusociality among insects like ants and bees. An ant nest or a bee hive is something like a single superorganism, with most of its members sterile workers striving – even committing suicide — for the colony’s reproduction, not their own. (100 million years ago – corresponding to March 29 in Logarithmic History — is when we find the first bee and ant fossils, but the transition must have been underway before that time.)

Certainly the statistics on social insects today are impressive.

The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. … In one Amazon site, two German researchers … found that ants and termites together compose almost two-thirds of the weight of all the insects. Eusocial bees and wasps added another tenth. Ants alone weighed four times more than all the terrestrial vertebrates – that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. E. O. Wilson pp 110-113

E. O. Wilson, world’s foremost authority on ants, and one of the founders of sociobiology, thinks that the origin of insect eusociality might have lessons for another major evolutionary transition, the origin of humans (and of human language, technology, culture, and complex social organization). In his book The Social Conquest of Earth he argues that a key step in both sets of transitions was the development of a valuable and defensible home – in the case of humans, a hearth site. Wilson returns to this argument in his book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Human Societies, just published, which I’ll get around to saying more about here eventually. On the same topic, Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm: How Human Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall,  asks how it is that we somehow rival the social insects in our scale of organization.

One trait found in both ants and humans is large-scale warfare. Wilson gives an idea of the nature of ant warfare in fictional form in his novel Anthill. It’s an interesting experiment, but also disorienting. Because individual recognition is not important for ants, his story of the destruction of an ant colony reads like the Iliad with all the personal names taken out. But Homer’s heroes fought for “aphthiton kleos,” undying fame (and got some measure of it in Homer’s poem). The moral economy of reputation puts human cooperation in war and peace on a very different footing from insect eusociality. (Here’s my take on “ethnic group selection,” which depends on social enforcement, perhaps via reputation.)

“Consider her ways” is the title of a short story by John Wyndham, about a woman from the present trapped in a future ant-like all-female dystopia. It was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title is from Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”