SOCIAL TRANSITIONS 245 



And from a still different point of view, those who 

 would stretch the idea of social living rather widely 

 would say, as I have indicated in Chapter V, that 

 when animals behave differently in the presence of 

 others than they would if alone, they are to that 

 extent social. (115) 



These ideas concerning what constitutes a proper 

 definition of animal societies, while not necessarily 

 mutually exclusive, are sufficiently different to raise 

 difficulties when one tries to examine critically the 

 useful general concept of social life; it will be profit- 

 able to study some of them separately. 



As to the first definition, that social life must be 

 limited to those animals that possess a social instinct, 

 an inherited behavior pattern, it is hard to demon- 

 strate beyond reasonable doubt that many patterns 

 of social behavior are in fact inherited. Is the 

 tendency of many fishes to form closely-knit schools 

 inherited or an early-conditioned bit of behavior? 

 There is some evidence that it is inherited, but we 

 are not yet sure of it. But if it were granted that 

 such schooling tendencies are innate, it would not 

 necessarily follow that they are instinctive. There are 

 different degrees of complication of inherited be- 

 havior patterns, from the relatively simple reflex ac- 

 tion of an unborn embryo to the complex mating 

 behavior shown, for example, by some insects and 



