Despite the growing appreciation of the fundamental relation between
biology and sociology, it is still far from universal. That the latter
science is in a sense a division of the former is more often recognized by
the biologist than by the average well-informed student of human social
phenomena. The layman in sociology too often concerns himself solely with
the complexities of the human problems, and he remains unaware of the
manifold products in the way of communal organisms far lower in the scale
of life firmly established as primitive biological associations ages
before the first human beings so advanced in mental stature that tribal
unions were found good. Among insects especially the biologist finds many
types of organized living things, ranging widely from the solitary
individual--a counterpart of something even more primitive than the most
unsocial savage now existing--up to communities that rival human
civilization, as regards the concerted effect of the diversified lives of
the component units. The student of the whole of living nature is favored
still more in that he learns how the make-up of such a simple organism as
a jellyfish displays principles underlying the structure of the whole and
the interplay of the parts that are identical with principles of
organization everywhere else.
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