BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 



THERE are many facile comparisons to be 

 drawn between the facts of biology and 

 of sociology. The most obvious is that be- 

 tween a whole civilized community and one of the 

 higher animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old 

 fable in Menenius Agrippa's Tale of the Belly and 

 the Members in Coriolanus. With Darwin, and the 

 establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound 

 footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now 

 seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely 

 by analogies of his own mind's weaving, but by the 

 living bonds of genetic descent ; and it was at once 

 perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto 

 been suspected might inhere in the comparisons be- 

 tween State and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, 

 was not the State in a true sense an organism — 2, 

 single biological unit composed of individual human 

 beings just as a metazoan animal was a single bio- 

 logical unit composed, in the first instance, of in- 

 dividual cells ? Further, the investigation of the 

 evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general 

 laws of its march : beings of the same original 



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