284 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



complex indeed and yet all based upon inherited 

 nervous structure. Consider the marvelous habits 

 of the ants in their colony or of the bees in their hive. 

 Everyone has read of their well-regulated domestic 

 economy, of their curious habits of making war, of 

 capturing their enemies young and rearing them as 

 slaves^ of their habits of keeping domestic animals 

 (plant lice) for their own use, of their planting the 

 spores of fungi in order to reap a crop later for food, 

 and of the many othei curiously interesting customs 

 that remind us forcibly of human society. The com- 

 parison between such conditions and human society 

 is indeed striking; but in one respect it fails, and 

 fails so radically as to destroy the parallel entirely. 

 The habits of ants and hees are clearly and surely 

 inherited hy organic inheritance. The ant never 

 needs to learn how to do its work, or even what to do. 

 Immediately after birth it begins to perform its 

 natural duties practically as well as it can after 

 extended experience. The ant does not learn from 

 experience, and, moreover, it acts blindly, without 

 even a knowledge of the purposes of its acts. We 

 call its actions instincts; whatever we may call them, 

 it is evident that they are born with the animal and 

 are thus transmitted by organic inheritance. They 

 are incorporated in the germinal substance and are 

 therefore transmitted to generation after generation 

 with seemingly little variation. 



In sharp contrast to all this stands the problem of 

 the customs of the human social organism. Al- 

 though the instincts of the ant may be only the out- 

 ward expressions of an inherited nervous structure, 

 this cannot be said of the characters of the human 

 society. This may be made clear by contrasting the 



