Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/410

 396 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

food shall be assured. Or when scattering does take place it may be by bands, and those bands whose members co-operate best in finding a food supply would have the best chance of survival.

The control over the food-process is the matter of supreme concern both to the individual and to the species. Not only is a stable food supply necessary for the survival of the individual, but reproduction can take place only after nutrition has reached a certain height, and it tends to go on only where food supply is abundant. Now, control over the food-process can be more easily established by groups of co-operating individuals than by isolated individuals. Natural selection operates, therefore, from the first in favor of such groups, and toward the elimination of individuals living relatively isolated. It must especially favor those groups in which the interactions between individual units are quick and sure — that is, those groups in which the power of psychic interstimulation and response is fully established, and in which intelligent co-operation and orderly relations between individuals are highly developed. It is not an accident that the most successful and, in general, the higher animals live in groups with well-ordered relations and highly developed means of inter- stimulation and co-operation.

Thus does the collective control over the food-process, estab- lished primarily by natural selection, become the positive basis of social organization, so that it is possible even to say, in a rough way, that the social process is a function of the food-process. The goal, indeed, of much conscious social development seems to be the collective control of the food-process. Whether it is the only goal, or the highest goal, of social development will be considered later. It suffices to point out here that social organiza- tion and evolution present themselves, from one point of view, largely as a direct outgrowth of that fundamental phase of the life-process which we have called the food-process.

Defense against enemies may be regarded as the negative side of the food-process, since it is largely in the efforts to secure and maintain a food supply that the necessity of defense arises. That such defense can be much better undertaken by groups of individuals than by isolated individuals; and that natural selec-