Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III GROUP COOPERATION IN the last chapter I discussed certain socially inherited expedients by which the work and thought of individual human beings can be directed. In this chapter I shall discuss certain socially inherited expedients by which human beings can direct their behavior when cooperating in groups. I use the word group in a strictly quantitative sense, to mean a body of human beings numbering from three or four up to about thirty or forty. That number seems to have been the ordinary limit of cooperation by primitive mankind; and the natural range of our senses and memory makes it easy for us to see, hear, and recognize, that number of our fellows. I shall postpone to later chapters the discussion of cooperation among bodies of men, like nations or associated nations, whose numbers far exceed such a limit. Here, as in the last chapter, I shall attempt to show the relation between natural biologically inherited, and artificial socially inherited forms of behavior. Man is a loosely and intermittently gregarious animal, who inherits instincts impelling him to certain natural forms of groupcooperation in such acts as fighting, hunting, and escaping from danger. The world contains many other gregarious species, and many different forms of natural cooperation. When bees and ants, for instance, cooperate in building the nest, storing food, or tending the young, they are naturally impelled to a form of cooperation consisting of a division of labor between structurally differing classes, such as the queens and drones and workers among the bees, or the workers and soldiers among the ants. Within each class there seems to be little cooperation by leadership and obedience. Each individual in a class either goes his way in the performance of a routine task, or, as whe...