Social Behavior and Survival

THE convener of this symposium has given me the enviable position of being the last speaker on the program (see Auk, 69: 127-182, 1952), but he has offset that by giving me the most difficult subject-at least so it seems to me-of social behavior and survival. One can certainly talk about gregariousness, the development of social behavior, and the fundamental factor of sociality in reproduction, but to be faced with commenting on social behavior and survival I feel that I am in serious danger of being teleological or of picking facts to support an argument, and that will never do. Perhaps it would be easier to show the part of social behavior in survival of the individual or of the species by a study of negative evidence, but we should all have a tedious half-hour. Social behavior and survival are so closely linked that I feel I can do no more than emphasize the obvious. The animal cannot truly stand alone and, as we are now coming to understand, neither can a good many plants. The whole trend of ecological thought at present is towards a realization of the importance of community, and in this respect we are becoming increasingly aware of the social interactions between species and the whole complex of the ecologic association. But, of course, I must not beg the question by calling on the wide ecological field. The animal, as I say, cannot truly stand alone; the social interest is there, implicit and inherent, mainly to be derivedas I believe-from the fundamental need for reproduction. But there is more to it than that. I believe an animal needs to go outside itself, just as we do, and to enter into relationships with others of its kind. There seems to be in animal life a reciprocal responsiveness which in itself leads to a development of variability of behavior-and there can be no evolution without variability. It would be unscientific to say that this generic need for the awareness of other selves is designed to lead towards cooperative behavior, but cooperation undoubtedly develops. That inherent, unconscious, reciprocal responsiveness is, in fact, cooperation in its simplest sense. How does this view square with the orthodox biology of the later nineteenth century? Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the survival of the fittest. There was an interminable struggle for existence. Darwin's followers took the bald hypothesis farther than he would have been prepared to go, I think, and the notion of Nature red in tooth and claw'.' blinded us to the complementary notion of evolution, which implied survival, continuing through cooperative