The Social Life of Animals

Abstract

WHEN Huxley wrote that among animals and among primitive men “Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence,” he was, not for the first time, overstating the case. The idea that co-operation is as ‘natural’ and as fundamental as competition is at least as old as Empedocles. Darwin used the term ‘struggle for existence’ “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another”, and Herbert Spencer insisted that “from the dawn of life altruism has been no less essential than egoism”. Patrick Geddes and Arthur Thomson used to impress upon their students the importance of sociality as a factor in animal evolution, and Kropotkin, uncritical though he was, did good service by pointing out the inadequacy of the gladiatorial theory of life. In recent years, the very active school of animal ecology directed by Prof. Alice in Chicago has given much attention to the problems of animal aggregations, seeking to discover the links that hold them together and the advantages, individual or racial, derived from them. In this volume, based on a course of lectures delivered at the Northwestern University, he gives a summary of the more important results of these researches and discusses their significance.

The Social Life of Animals

By Prof. W. C. Allee. Pp. xiv + 265 + 5 plates. (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, Ltd., n.d.) 12s. 6d. net.