274 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



must fall, like scores and hundreds of others that lie 

 along the road of historic progress a road strewn with 

 the remains of the unfit thrown out by natural selection. 



What now are the lessons of social evolution and what 

 guidance does science give for human endeavor? Al- 

 though it may seem that the biologist leaves his field 

 when he considers these questions, his duty would be 

 unfulfilled if he neglected an opportunity to give his 

 results their highest utility through their use for the 

 betterment of human life. 



The first lesson is that the history of human social 

 organization is far from unique, and that it is identical 

 with the process by which insect communities and cell- 

 aggregates have evolved ; in a word, the laws of bio- 

 logical association are uniform throughout the entire 

 organic scale. In some respects evolution in mankind 

 has yet to equal the heights attained by some insects, 

 inasmuch as no human society has accomplished so rigid 

 a specialization of its members that a given individual 

 is foreordained by its inherited structure to be a par- 

 ticular kind of worker and nothing else. Furthermore, 

 evolution in human society is still far short of a state 

 where some and some only are reproductive members 

 of the group while the others are necessarily sterile; 

 social insects with stable colonies are so organized that 

 the queens and drones are solely reproductive while the 

 workers are destined to care for the material wants of 

 the colony. It is true that the birth-rate is by no means 

 the same in all classes of society, but the social and 

 other adventitious restrictions that bring this about are 



