362 ANIMAL AGGREGATIONS 



As a result of the working of these two principles, man has de- 

 veloped social groups, the scope of whose organization has been 

 constantly extended until at the present time we are confronted 

 with the problems centering about national versus international 

 organization. Now, as in each stage of the social evolution of man, 

 the proponents of the narrower organization maintain that the type 

 of groupings they advocate satisfies the natural instinctive and 

 traditional drives of man, while the more inclusive grouping is an 

 abnormal desire for an idealistic Utopia. So might the conservative 

 primitive-living molecules, the protozoans, flatworms, isopods, or 

 ants have argued, had they the wit, at each stage of their co-opera- 

 tive evolution. It may be helpful, and restful as well, to remember 

 that the great majority of the evolution of social life has been 

 brought about, not by conscious effort on the part of those under- 

 going evolution, but by the natural working-out of these two funda- 

 mental principles of struggle and co-operation. 



We have been concerned in this book in tracing the earliest be- 

 ginnings of these secondary (group) reactions (whether shown in 

 overt acts or more subtly revealed), exhibited only under restricted 

 conditions in nature which may be mimicked by properly controlled 

 laboratory conditions. We have found that the physiology of the 

 group considered independently from that of the individuals of which 

 it is composed, begins simply and shows stages in development which 

 can be arranged in various sorts of ascending series and which culmi- 

 nate in the group-centered, division-of-labor type of society that at 

 first glance seems impossibly remote from the life of the so-called 

 "solitary" animals. 



Brilliant students of the highly social life of insects, like Wheeler, 

 have found evidence that the behavior of these societies, taken to- 

 gether with observations on ecological associations and the various 

 activities that center about reproduction, indicate the existence of 

 a fundamental tendency toward co-operation. It has been much 

 more easy for a student beginning with the humbler group levels 

 to follow, from the social beginnings which he learns to recognize in 

 almost unintegrated animal aggregations, the possibilities of the de- 

 velopment of great social structures; and to trace their growth slowly 

 and as yet imperfectly, but surely. 



