SOCIAL TRANSITIONS 26 1 



The flocks of male birds whose social organization 

 we have studied in Chapter VI are more combative 

 than the females. The human male writes the great 

 poems, builds the great bridges, performs the out- 

 standing scientific research; but he is also the crim- 

 inal, the war-maker, the disturber of the peace. It 

 is the human female that is the highly social force 

 with our species, and in this we are again similar 

 to the others mentioned. 



Among the social animals only the termites have 

 fully socialized males; with them the male reproduc- 

 tives consort with the female throughout life. Half 

 the soldiers are males and the other half are females, 

 and so are the workers. Termites are lowly insects, 

 but in this one trait they lead the world. No one 

 knows how the socialization of male termites was 

 brought about, and if we should learn their secret 

 it probably could not be applied directly to human 

 affairs. 



When we turn from the far-reaching division of 

 most animals into two sexual castes to explore the 

 origin of the more specialized castes of insects, we 

 find two different essential kinds, the reproductives 

 and the sterile types. With bees, ants and wasps, for 

 example, the usual reproductive females can pro- 

 duce eggs without being fertilized by a sperma- 

 tozoan. Such eggs always give rise to males. From 



