THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL LIFE 83 



individual would lead to social failure. Somewhere in be- 

 tween, with predominantly intelligent behavior, lies the suc- 

 cessful formula. Nature has not yet found it on earth; nor 

 does that mean she cannot find it here or elsewhere. 



The geneticist suggests that social organization arose 

 through the operation of natural selection. Grouping is of 

 use to the individuals participating; and if, as in birds and 

 mammals, it leads to some peace and order, a survival factor 

 is obviously involved. Peaceful animals eat more and repro- 

 duce more. In the social hierarchy of the chickens, high- 

 ranking cocks and hens will produce more chicks. The in- 

 dividuals in a society possess the genes, and if these genes 

 tend to produce responses favoring the group, the over-all 

 survival possibility is increased. An increasingly favored 

 group will increasingly favor the individuals within it. 



The attempt to establish the concept of society as a super- 

 individual does not seem, in the opinion of some biologists, 

 to be helpful. This is an extension of the unicellular to the 

 multicellular to the multi-individual, wherein the social 

 group is, at least by inference, taken to be an entity. J. S. 

 Huxley even adds to this extension when he declares that the 

 whole organic world is one great individual with interde- 

 pendent parts. The inference in this mystical concept is that 

 the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is based, how- 

 ever, on our ignorance of both the whole and the parts. If we 

 have complete knowledge of the parts, we find the whole to 

 be their sum. Chemists, with all their present knowledge of 

 atomic structure, will not use this concept to say, as emergent 

 evolutionists once did, that water is more than the sum of the 

 gases hydrogen and oxygen. They know that all the charac- 

 teristics of hydrogen and oxygen will not be revealed until all 

 their various unions are studied. In this case each element has 

 the property of forming a liquid when joined with the 

 other. F. A. Shull sums up this situation as follows: 



So a society is made up of its individuals. When we discover that 

 an animal does things in company that it does not do when alone, 



