152 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



tual agreement what they had built up by the same means 

 was one of the arguments in favor of the French Revolution. 

 At the present time the doctrine has no sociological impor- 

 tance, except possibly to a certain type of reformer. 



4. Another intellectuahstic hypothesis of societal origins 

 was excogitated by Starcke who beheved that early man took 

 up social life because he had observed its advantages among 

 the social insects in his environment. Similar fanciful notions 

 have been occasionally advanced to account for more modest 

 human inventions, e.g. the supposition that the Australian 

 aborigines derived the boomerang from observing the 

 circular paths described by the falling sickel-shaped leaves 

 of certain species of Eucalyptus. While this latter hypothesis 

 cannot be dismissed as altogether improbable, Starcke's 

 notion becomes absurd when we consider that man must 

 have been a social animal long before he had sufficient 

 intelligence to observe and imitate the social insects and 

 that, even had he conceived society as the result of such 

 casual observations, that fact would not have enabled him 

 to maintain it throughout his whole subsequent racial 

 history in all parts of the world. 



5. Darwin's hypothesis of evolution through natural 

 selection is, of course, quite a different matter. According to 

 it, social origins are really accidental, but when men had 

 once established social relations with one another, the 

 advantages accruing would lead to the survival of 

 the individuals that adhered to the social habit, while 

 those who reverted to a solitary mode of life would be 

 eliminated. Naturally, from a human point of view, the 

 advantages of society are enormous, and existing man has 

 never experienced any other mode of life, but the selection 

 hypothesis, though logical, does not go to the root of the 

 matter. The merely evolutionary, or transformist core of 

 the hypothesis, however, is immensely important. We 

 should not be wrong in stating that evolution may be more 

 easily demonstrated in ethnology, archeology, and history 

 than in the study of living and extinct organisms. 



6. If we revert to the principle of emergence, briefly 

 considered in the introduction to this chapter, we might say 

 that human society arose rather suddenly and discon- 



