i8o evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



lular to the multicellular to the human, has arisen the next 

 extension, social life. Here we have a trend of immense im- 

 portance to the evolution of the mind-matter continuum. It 

 should be apparent now that man is nothing without his so- 

 ciety. Indeed, it was brought out in the chapters on the evo- 

 lution of social organization that only through some sort of 

 cooperative life is it possible for most animals to survive. 

 There are no asocial animals. For high-level understanding 

 there is an absolute requirement of cooperative life, namely, 

 mutual aid. The trend is very clearly demonstrated from the 

 lowest to the highest strata of life (see Chaps. 7 and 8). So- 

 cial life wanders off into many side alleys— possibly all of 

 them blind, even that of the society of man. Obviously, the 

 fate of man's effort toward social life is important to us, and, 

 although a brief review of this situation is most difficult, the 

 task will be attempted here and there in the succeeding 

 chapters. 



Preceding and going along with the evolution of societies 

 is the trend toward an increasing intimacy of relationship 

 between parents and offspring, a relationship which begins, 

 according to Ashley Montagu, even at the unicellular level 

 and culminates in the very long and highly instructive post- 

 natal life of man. Through this relationship the organism 

 gets its immediate urge toward mutual aid, the beginning of 

 an ethics in the animal kingdom. As was noted in Chapter 6, 

 a new kind of evolution, the transmission of acquired social 

 characters, enters through the parent-offspring relationship 

 in man. This and other factors which may affect man's so- 

 cieties will come up again in Chapter 16, "Evolution and 

 Ethics." 



The great trend toward an increasing dominance of men- 

 tal life has been carefully reviewed in Chapters 9 to 12. The 

 two phases of this trend, instinct and intelligence, reach 

 their highest levels in the insects and man, where the differ- 

 ences in behavior to which the two lead are very strikingly 

 represented. As was brought out in the review, no animal 



