SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS 273 



operation. Arriving at a market-place, we obtain such 

 an article of food as a fish without having to go out upon 

 the water ourselves, for many other workers have built 

 vessels that we do not know how to make and may not 

 know how to handle, and hundreds of fishermen devote 

 their lives to their special task, not for themselves, but 

 for us and all others, such as the builder, the subway 

 operator, the boat maker, and the manufacturers who 

 supply their clothing and apparatus. 



What has come about then is a higher degree of 

 specialization in the performance of the fundamental 

 biological tasks, resulting in the formation of coherent 

 and efficient groups comprising millions as compared 

 with the thousands of barbarism and the hundreds of 

 savagery. Just so the communities of insects with the 

 greatest degree of altruism and division of labor far 

 exceed in numbers the small colonies of the social wasps 

 with lower social differentiation. 



But the great biological functions of an entire com- 

 plex civihzed society remain the same as those of a 

 primitive savage family unit, of an insect community, 

 of Hydra, and of Amoeba. Let any nation fail to main- 

 tain itself in material individual respects, it must inevi- 

 tably die out ; in the islands of the South Seas many a 

 tragic death-struggle of a people can be witnessed. If 

 in the second place a nation should concern itself too 

 greatly with the material benefits of human life without 

 obeying the natural mandate to propagate itself, its 

 place in the scheme of things becomes insecure, as in 

 the case of the French Republic. Natural social laws 

 that go back to Amoeba must be observed, consciously 

 or unconsciously, or else even the civilized community 



