SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS 267 



of the members of one species may be naturally wrong 

 and evil in another case. To kill the princesses in order 

 to obviate the possibility of civil war seems advanta- 

 geous and therefore right when the queen remains in 

 the persistent colony of honeybees, ready to do her part 

 the following spring ; but it might result in disaster and 

 evil in the case of the social wasps, where the community 

 dies as such in the fall, and the continuity of the species 

 from one year to another requires the production of 

 many queens lest the severe conditions of the- winter's 

 hibernation should kill all fertile females if only one or 

 two were available. The standards of conduct are 

 simple indeed; and whether or not it may seem best 

 to separate the processes of social and ethical evolution 

 culminating in human phenomena, the fact remains 

 that these processes begin with elements discovered by 

 the biologist among organisms of the lower levels in the 

 scale. ^ 



We come at length to the biological interpretation of 

 human social evolution, in so far as this may be ex- 

 pounded in a simple and concise form. The compara- 

 tive method must be employed in order to discover the 

 fundamental attributes of savage, barbarous, and civilized 

 communities which seem to differ so considerably in 

 their complexity of social structure, and in order also 

 to show that such basic elements are like those of com- 

 munities formed by lower animals, and are equally the 

 products of natural evolution. This whole subject 

 seems to be exceedingly complex, because in our daily 

 contact with others of our kind and in our occasional 



