What has come about then is a higher degree of specialization in the performance of the fundamental biological tasks, resulting in the formation of coherent and efficient groups comprising millions as compared with the thousands of barbarism and the hundreds of savagery.  Just so the communities of insects with the greatest degree of altruism and division of labor far exceed in numbers the small colonies of the social wasps with lower social differentiation.

But the great biological functions of an entire complex civilized society remain the same as those of a primitive savage family unit, of an insect community, of Hydra, and of Amoeba.  Let any nation fail to maintain itself in material individual respects, it must inevitably die out; in the islands of the South Seas many a tragic death-struggle of a people can be witnessed.  If in the second place a nation should concern itself too greatly with the material benefits of human life without obeying the natural mandate to propagate itself, its place in the scheme of things becomes insecure, as in the case of the French Republic.  Natural social laws that go back to Amoeba must be observed, consciously or unconsciously, or else even the civilized community must fall, like scores and hundreds of others that lie along the road of historic progress—­a road strewn with the remains of the unfit thrown out by natural selection.

What now are the lessons of social evolution and what guidance does science give for human endeavor?  Although it may seem that the biologist leaves his field when he considers these questions, his duty would be unfulfilled if he neglected an opportunity to give his results their highest utility through their use for the betterment of human life.

The first lesson is that the history of human social organization is far from unique, and that it is identical with the process by which insect communities and cell-aggregates have evolved; in a word, the laws of biological association are uniform throughout the entire organic scale.  In some respects evolution in mankind has yet to equal the heights attained by some insects, inasmuch as no human society has accomplished so rigid a specialization of its members that a given individual is foreordained by its inherited structure to be a particular kind of worker and nothing else.  Furthermore, evolution in human society is still far short of a state where some and some only are reproductive members of the group while the others are necessarily sterile; social insects with stable colonies are so organized that the queens and drones are solely reproductive while the workers are destined to care for the material wants of the colony.  It is true that the birth-rate is by no means the same in all classes of society, but the social and other adventitious restrictions that bring this about are not on the same plane with the hereditary determining factors which operate among insects.  Therefore the scale of human communities proves to be only a part of the wider range of organic associations in general—­a part which can be definitely placed in such a wider scheme and so become more intelligible in itself.