Sociological Aspects 
DISCUSSION 
Bronowski: I shall confine myself to two remarks to which the 
three papers have prompted me. 
I can best begin the first by saying that the number of 
fundamental particles in the universe is under some dispute, 
but it is supposed by some to be of the order of 107° (Eddington 
and Whitrow). This is incomparably larger than any foresee- 
able human or animal population! Yet nature controls the 
stability of processes among fundamental particles by a very 
simple device: it does not attempt to manipulate them all at the 
same time. It builds them up into stable subunits, for instance 
into nuclei; then it reassembles these nuclei into more elaborate 
nuclei. For instance, nature takes four fundamental particles 
and makes a helium nucleus. Then it takes three helium nuclei 
and reassembles them into one carbon nucleus—the basis of all 
biological discussion. These nuclei are then assembled into 
more elaborate structures, and so on. Nature works by 
hierarchies. I know of no natural phenomenon which proceeds 
in any other way: you can only make large stable structures by 
building them from stable substructures. ‘This is true of clusters 
of stars, say, and it is surely true of families and communities— 
which is the application that we are discussing now. 
So I was struck in Coon’s and in Glikson’s talks by the 
recognition that whatever human community you plan, you 
have to start by building it from smaller self-coherent com- 
munities—sometimes from breeding groups of 300 or 400 
people, sometimes from what Coon elegantly called “villages 
within the city”’. 
The integration of these human groups, step by step, into 
national and international units has turned out to be much 
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