112 MAN THE ANIMAL 



communistic termite society behaves differently. The termite 

 savings banks have only one customer per bank, the colony. No 

 individual has an account. 



II 



Now while the insect patterns of sociality have certain evident 

 points of superiority over the mammalian patterns, notably in 

 respect to their much greater stability and efficiency, after all 

 they are intrinsically different and not well suited to man as he 

 is constituted at present. Perhaps in the slow passage of time he 

 may evolve further towards these insect patterns. There are signs 

 that this may turn out to be his trend. But before going into that 

 question it will be profitable to examine in some detail the pat- 

 terns of existing human society. 



The technique that man evolved as an adaptive process to 

 meet the difficulties that arose out of the necessity for living to- 

 gether in restricted quarters is essentially comprised within the 

 frame of the system called government by law. This system had 

 its dim beginnings in evolutionary history at the very inception 

 of mammalian sociality itself with the biological family — parents 

 and children constituting a group that must be socially organized 

 for at least the rather prolonged period of infancy during which 

 offspring cannot get their own livings. Let us consider for a 

 moment what the terms law and government really mean. When 

 individual mammals have to live together friction inevitably 

 arises. One annoys another, or interferes with it, or damages it. 

 Whether the individuals are kin to each other makes no differ- 

 ence; nor does the age distribution of the group, or any other of 

 its biological characteristics. At bottom the difficulties arise out 

 of too close and too persistent contiguity. This leads to what we 

 have called the "collision effect" — mere bumping into each 

 other, as it were. In the case of the fruitfly DrosofhilUy where 

 there appears to be no trace of true sociality at all, it has been 

 possible to show experimentally that as density of population 

 increases, and by consequence there is an increase in the fre- 

 quency of interference of individuals with each other, such 



