24 ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



of the hive, making the honeycomb, gathering and storing 

 the honey, rearing the young, guiding the queen in the 

 performance of her duties, expelling the males when the 

 breeding season is over, in fact running the whole hive. 

 In this case it is not the individual worker which is the unit, 

 but the community in which it lives, the hive. It is the 

 whole hive, with all its mutually helpful members, that enters 

 the struggle for existence, and natural selection determines 

 which hives, just as much as which individual bees, shall 

 survive. There is selection here of communities as well as 

 individuals for survival, and an individual useful to the 

 community for some other reason than breeding will be pre- 

 served because of this other value. 



Among human beings we have excellent illustration of 

 the fact that their helpfulness to the young or to the 

 community as a whole may make the continued life of the 

 parents of value, though they bear no more children. The 

 human child is very imperfectly developed at birth ; it is 

 dependent on the parent's care ; should the parent die 

 the child would suffer. The life of the parent cannot be 

 allowed, then, to cease with the birth of the child. More 

 than this, the family is in a very real way a unit in the 

 struggle for existence, and the continued life of its members 

 helps the family to succeed, so that when the children of 

 the family shall begin to rear families of their own, they 

 shall have an advantageous start in their new, semi-inde- 

 pendent life. Again there is a rivalry between communi- 

 ties of a larger sort. Different industrial centres enter into 

 competition with one another, and nation contends with 

 nation and race with race. As the continued life of the 

 individual beyond the close of the reproductive period is 



