150 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



give the society concerned a certain degree of organization." 

 This "pecking order" which would seem to be the cohesive 

 among the peuplades, corresponding to the very different 

 cohesive, trophallaxis, among the societies of insects, leads 

 naturally to a complex, organized hierarchy of individuals, 

 depending on their age, sex, vigor, and blufFmg capacity. 

 It is so suggestive of human communities, in which we have 

 a similar hierarchy of social status based on the bivalent 

 self-assertion and self-abaserrfent, or sadistic and masochistic 

 motives of the individual, that the results of further investi- 

 gations on the peuplades of other Vertebrates will be awaited 

 with interest. Perhaps what we call government in human 

 societies is really only a glorified "pecking order !"^ 



When we turn to the societies of man we are confronted 

 with an emergent level so much higher and so much more 

 compHcated than that of any of the other social animals 

 that it seems to transcend analysis. Biologically it is obvious 

 that it consists of a great number of genetically related 

 families, and though there is among the individuals of each 

 of these a division of labor essentially like that of the animal 

 family, there is superadded a more elaborate division of 

 labor which traverses the families and is quite unlike that 

 of the unifamilial society of insects, since it is a product of 

 learning and custom and has not become hereditary. Further- 

 more, his much more highly developed neuromuscular 

 system, intelligence, memory, and language have enabled 

 man to create and transmit from generation to generat'on 

 vast accumulations in the form of stores of knowledge, 

 elaborate institutions, constructions, mores, arts, sciences, 

 etc., which the animals, restricted to their Hmited hereditary 

 endowments and feeble individual plasticity of response to 

 their inorganic and living environment, could neither develop 

 nor transmit. This tradition, or social memory, has therefore 

 been regarded as the leading pecuharity of human societies, 

 but it must be admitted that there are some very rudimental 

 indications of it even in the social insects. 



^ In this connection it is interesting to note that the domestication of 

 animals depends on a similar order. Nearly all our domestic animals belong 

 to social species and their successful subjugation implies, so to speak, a realiza- 

 tion on their part of their defenseless inferiority in the presence of man. 



