History and Natural History 



LIKE other human disciplines, science has its or- 

 thodox and its heterodox views. The idea that un- 

 conscious automatic co-operation exists has had a 

 long history, and yet it is just now beginning to 

 escape from the heterodox category. 



My own interest in this subject dates not from a 

 preconceived idea but from a clearly remembered 

 bump against some stubborn experiments. Almost 

 thirty years ago as a graduate student in zoology I 

 was engaged in studying the behavior of some com- 

 mon small fresh-water animals called isopods, tiny 

 relatives of the crayfish. All fall and winter I had 

 been collecting them from quiet mud-bottomed 

 ponds, chopping the ice if necessary, and from be- 

 neath stones and under leaves in clear small streams. 



I kept them in the laboratory under conditions 

 which resembled those in which they lived in na- 

 ture. Then day after day I put lots of five or ten 

 isopods into shallow water in a round pan that had 

 a sanded wax bottom so prepared that the isopods 



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