3. Order and Disorder

The loneliness of man is the loneliness of the animal. We must have each other. The baboon seeks his troop, the bookkeeper his busy office, the buffalo his herd on some far savanna, the weary bricklayer his fellows at the corner pub, the starling his chattering flock among London streets, the hyena his clan, the farmer his wife when the last chores are done, the herring his school in the cold North Sea, all for quite the same reason: because we cannot survive without each other.

The animal cannot stand alone. When Frank Fraser Darling, the Scottish naturalist and conservationist, put forward the brief thought less than twenty years ago, its implications seemed scarcely revolutionary. Yet until that time we had tended to see the societies of animals as accidental, voluntary, disorganized. We spoke of the gregarious instinct. We mentioned the herd, the horde. And, on the contrary, we regarded human societies in a quite different light as a necessity of unique human life with structures and functions peculiar to the needs of men. But as the studies of animal societies progress, we are coming to see all groupings, whether of men or animals, as mechanisms with common mainsprings, common ratchets and bearings, common balance wheels of subtle regulation; for all have evolved to meet the same need, that of one individual for another.

I have offered the definition of a society as a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs. And there are animal situations where neither the grouping nor the organization may be apparent to the human observer. When Charles Darwin in the midst of his famous voyage made a long stop in Uruguay, he recorded an experience still unsure of explanation. On a huge estancia he found a herd of cattle numbering over ten thousand. It seemed to the unpracticed eye a disorganized agglomerate of beasts. But, as all herdsmen knew, the throng was subdivided into groups of fifty or a hundred that stayed always in the vicinity of one another. Then one night came a terrifying series of electrical storms. The cattle panicked, milled, bolted, dispersed in the dark, panicked and dispersed again. By morning it was as if a deck of ten thousand cards had been shuffled and reshuffled the long night through. For the human herders, restoration of original arrangements was impossible. Yet within twenty-four hours not an animal had failed to find its original partners and with them to resume normal social life.

An informed guess today would suggest that Darwin's cattle were directed to find one another by animal xenophobia, the fear and avoidance of strangers. Few forces of order are more universal in animal groupings or more resonant of human ways. It is a basic force of social structure ensuring the integrity of the group, and I can conceive of no other force that so effectively could have sorted out ten thousand cattle all, to the human eye, looking much the same. Yet it is only one of the structural mechanisms making social life possible.

Superficial acceptance of the herd and the gregarious instinct, which one still will find in sociology's literature, failed to inspect the infinite subdivisions lying beneath the mass and yet presenting the true social reality. One recalling Darwin's cattle may turn to more recent naivetes such as the expectation that black Africa, in our view an enormous undifferentiated herd of dark-skinned people, would willingly unite for rational ends. Now, in our disillusionment, we discover the underlying realities of language, territory, tribe. And one may gain a quick insight concerning values to be gained from the study of animal orders.

Just as the grouping and structure of animals may not be immediately apparent to the observer, so the social function of mediating the problems of unequals may seem likewise obscure. I shall be returning to this at length. But the superb British ornithologist David Lack has left us a record of a case which, while extreme, still illuminates the function. It concerns a blind old white pelican found in the midst of a colony. Pelicans fish in an African lake in a tight, highly organized column, all diving together simultaneously in a comical all-tails-up image. Not for days or probably years had the old blind pelican been able to fish in such a group. How had he survived? They could only have fed him.

The old pelican's inequality was phenotypic, as I described the term earlier. His blindness we must assume was a consequence of experience, whether of argument or of other hazard. Pelican society saved him. But underlying the compulsions of social order one finds not just the disorderly maladventures of living experience, but, far more deeply, the adventures of the night's accident.

The disorder of genotypes -- the natural law that sexual conception must produce individuals of diverse potentiality -- is the law that dictates the phenotypic order known as society. In other words, among vertebrate species social order starts happening after you are born. As the womb is the cradle of the egg, so is society the cradle of the individual in his life of experience that will reduce, display, or enhance the range of possibilities which accident originally commanded. Society is the evolutionary invention mediating the necessities of order and disorder. But it is essentially a device for the vulnerable.

The solitary life, if indeed it can be said to exist, is a rare sort of blossom on nature's bush. The leopard is such a being. Perfectly armed with fangs and cunning, he needs no assistance on the hunt. Perfectly organized with strength and agility, he needs no partners to protect his kill. When rarely you glimpse him in the African bush, he will usually be sleeping in the fork of a tree with the remains of a carcass as large as himself draped on the limb beside him. No lion or hyena can reach him to make off with his larder; he is as self-sufficient as any creature you will ever see. The relaxation of a spotted foreleg dangling from the fever tree's sulfur-green embrace testifies to leopard freedom; and we may envy him. Yet when the female comes into heat, then he must seek her. And though his social life be limited to a few occasional hours of copulation, still no leopard can afford to live too far away from other leopards.

Few of us can be as lucky as leopards. There are other species, of course, equipped so suitably or subtlely to meet life's demands that with minimum social concession they can proceed along chosen ways. There are the badger, the marten, the mink; we may envy a few reptiles like the chameleon or snake. One we need not envy at all is the praying mantis, a delicate if voracious insect with forelegs hypocritically placed as in prayer. It is a species that has made the minimum compromise between sexual reproduction and social antagonism.

The evolutionary dilemma of the praying mantis rests on the eagerness of the female to eat anything, including the male. How one gets by that problem in a sexually reproducing species I submit to psychiatrists as a knotty one. Evolution, however, has come up with an answer and, grisly though it be, it works. The female is endowed with poorer eyesight than the male; and she can see him only when he moves. But he has the eye of an eagle concerning what she is up to, whether washing her wings or grooming her insect-equivalent of eyebrows before an insect-equivalent mirror. In the time of sexual heat she of course attracts him, but the long history of the species has equipped the male with inhibitions concerning his consort's less attractive qualities. He approaches her, compelled. But a turn of her head in his direction freezes him. He has the capacity to stand without motion, perhaps with one leg lifted, for an hour or more. And, so posed, he remains invisible to her. Sooner or later she will lose interest and return to the diversions of the powder room. And he will make another foray.

That sex can be a dangerous game requires no comment. Back in the 1930's, however, a zoologist named Karl Roeder became so impressed by praying-mantis relations that he made an elaborate study of the neurological arrangements making survival of the species possible. For while the male, with a final leap, may secure himself on her back unnoticed, there to proceed with copulation, a fair chance exists that he will fail. At the last instant she will glimpse his movement, seize him with her deceptively named forelegs, and begin to eat him. She begins always by chewing off his head.

Having lost his head, he literally loses all fear of her. Roeder found that the center of inhibition lies in the male's brain, while the sexual drive has its center in the abdomen. Headless, abandoned freely to the sexual compulsion, he wrenches from her grasp, mounts her back where she cannot see him, and copulates. Then slowly he will weaken, lose his grip, die. When he slides off to the ground, she will discover him again and finish eating him.

I am aware of no species in which the sexual necessity has commanded arrangements quite so unsatisfactory for the male. In general, the same sexual reproduction that brought to natural selection the disorder of genetic diversity brought the need for a degree of order between the sexes, however brief. There is a family of flies called Empidae in which the male brings the cannibalistic female a gift, a bit of food wrapped in a web. While she unwraps it, he copulates. There is even one species in which the male, whether out of laziness or rudimentary cynicism, fails to include the food in the package. It still works.

While it might be said that whether we consider leopards or badgers, the praying mantis or flies bearing gifts, we deal with the minimum society that sex commands, still it does not fall within my definition of a group organized to meet common needs. A population of solitary animals must exist in such a reasonable vicinity as to make contact when reproduction is necessary. But this is the population or the deme that genetics describes, an isolated or semi-isolated grouping of individuals with genes sufficiently co-adapted to offer a reasonable probability of viable offspring. Its one organization is genetic, and what we observe is simply the embodiment of the gene pool. It is not a society.

There are other groupings which I shall not include as societies since they lack organization. The more we study herds, the fewer we find lacking truly social, organized subdivisions. Perhaps the vast herds of bison that once inhabited the American West were merely agglomerations; we do not know. Immense herds of zebra, such as one finds in South West Africa, deceive the eye as did Darwin's cattle; they are collections of discrete family parties. Huge schools of fish such as mackerel or herring are, so far as we know, entirely lacking in organization. That they have some need for each other is evident, or they would not school. But what that need is, and what the function of the school may be are questions that have evaded our best students. They are not what I term here societies.

And yet, as the school of fish presents glimmerings of the social necessity, so do such glimmerings appear in beings who existed before sex was born. W. C. Allee was our first great student of animal societies, and at his laboratories in Chicago he found himself impressed by the tendency of sexless, mindless, single-celled protozoa to thrive best in groups of "optimum number." Allee saw it as some forerunner of social life. He discovered that in the presence of a toxic substance, colloidal silver, the protozoa survival rate was far higher in groups than in those individually exposed. Allee could no more explain his protozoa than Darwin could explain his cattle. But he concluded that "potential sociality is as inherent in living organisms as are the potentials of disoperation. This means that social life is not an accident which appears sporadically among a few highly evolved animals. It is a normal and basically widespread phenomenon."

Our need for each other may be as mysterious as the needs of protozoa or mackerel, or as evident as the need of helpless young robins for two parents to feed them. It may be the need of the dangerous, like the wolf pack or lion pride, who cannot hunt efficiently except in a group; or it may be the need of the endangered, such as young penguins who must have adults to defend them from the rapacious skua. Our need may be as complex as that of the baboon who must have his troop not only to defend the individual but to provide an educational setting in which slow-growing young may learn and mature. Whatever the need, the true society, human or animal, encloses structures organizing its members of varying endowment, and fulfills functions which the individual cannot accomplish alone.

We may all of us yearn for anarchic autonomy. And some individuals among even the most social of species may have the superior capacity to go it alone. So we may find a powerful male gorilla high among the volcanoes of the eastern Congo making his solitary way through bamboo thickets. Or we may and probably shall confront a massive, invincible bull elephant tearing apart trees by the Limpopo River, permanently or temporarily enjoying his anarchy and the delights of a bad disposition. But we shall never find an elephant cow or a female gorilla bathed in such luxury. Vulnerability, whether her own or that of her young, will keep her securely in the social embrace.

Out of our need for each other we form our alliances, forswear our temptations, accept our compromises, obey happily or unhappily the rules of social order. The human being, observing the species, will recognize our common plight. The order of the gene pool is sufficient for the genotype with its demand for diversity. But for the development of the pheno-type in confrontation with environment, such order is seldom enough. And so evolution has presented us with organized societies as the survival mechanism for the vulnerable. And we shall see, I believe, that man -- the stroller in space, the presumable master of all he surveys -- is in truth as vulnerable a creature as nature has ever produced.

Defense consumes the major portion of most national budgets, just as it consumes the major energy of most animal societies. So fundamental is the obligation of the group to protect the individual that the alarm signal, in almost all species, becomes the very criterion for society itself. Lacking an alarm alerting its members to danger, the animal group, with very few exceptions, may be described as no society at all but a simple aggregation.

The alarm call may act simply as an alert, or it may set in motion the most complex of defensive actions. We are most of us familiar with the dense flights of starlings and the capacity of the flock to maneuver as one. How the birds communicate their directions for sudden turns, swoops, swerves, we do not know and perhaps never shall. But Oxford's Niko Tinbergen, who with the celebrated Konrad Lorenz pioneered in Europe the new science of ethology, has explained through natural selection how the birds have acquired their capacity.

The starling's most dangerous enemy is the peregrine falcon. Unlike the goshawk, which with a dazzling swoop takes its prey off the ground, the falcon strikes in mid-air. So distinct are the modes of attack that the sophisticated crow, looting a newly sown field, will take flight when sighting a goshawk; sighting a falcon, he will crouch. For the starling flock, airborne in countless number, there would seem to be no defense against the falcon. But the alarm call wakens miracles.

So incredible is the speed of the falcon's dive that at the moment of impact it may be moving at 150 miles an hour. To survive such an impact the falcon is equipped with powerful legs and talons, but its vulnerability must be obvious. At such speed, should anything go awry and the falcon strike its prey with a wing instead of its talons, the wing will be broken. And so, through the ages, starling and falcon have perfected their relation to the nicest of balances. Sighting a hovering falcon, the most alert member of the starling flock gives the instant alarm call. Now all crowd together nearly wingtip to wingtip and begin their unpredictable mass maneuvers. There is no leader. Somehow all participate in a common sense as to what the next swerve or dip will be.

The falcon of course dares not dive. So perfect is the starling social defense that any attack would be suicidal. And so he waits, hovering. And natural selection takes its toll. If one of the hundreds of massed birds has weakness of wing or fails in some fashion to sense the next turn, then it is separated from the flock and the falcon has it. And the unequal starling will leave no further descendants to encumber the flock's gene pool.

Starling defense illuminates the value of society to a group of unequals. In any given situation of danger one member, whether superior in alertness or simply lucky, will be the first to sense threat. And with the alarm call, the perception of the first becomes the property of the group. Spotting a golden eagle, a Wyoming prairie dog will give a specific cry and all members of his town will dive into their burrows. Spotting a coyote, he will give another, and all will stand on their mounds, alerted, watching. The alarm call is the social mechanism ensuring that all but the dullest or most careless will be prepared for the common need.

While in many an animal arrangement, such as the starling flock or the prairie-dog town, the giving of an alarm exposes the individual to no special danger, in others it may entail high risk. Animals benefiting from concealment, for example, give away their position as they give the alarm. Solutions may take such turns as camouflage. Some years ago the young Rhodesian scientist C. K. Brain and I were looking for samango monkeys in the high forests of the Vumba Mountains, a range lying between Rhodesia and Mozambique. The samango monkey is arboreal, brown and rather large, with the creased, lamenting face of some ancient Jew. At a distance, a troop is not too difficult to spot, since the heaviness of body makes the forest canopy dip and snap with their leaping about. When the intruder comes beneath the trees, however, all action ceases and the monkeys become difficult to find. There is silence, broken only by the occasional tweet-tweet of birds. My more knowledgeable companion pointed out that the tweet-tweet was the samango's camouflaged alarm call.

Elephant camouflage is even more subtle. In the earlier years of animal-watching I had frequently been puzzled by how my presence would attract the attention of all members of an elephant party simultaneously. There seemed no signal, audible or visible, nor did individuals, so far as I could see, take their cues from each other's movements. The problem, I found, had bothered others less innocent than I, and Irven Buss had solved it in a European zoo. There the keeper had led him to an elephant cow and directed Buss to put his hand beneath her throat. He could hear nothing, but he could feel a vibration like a kitten's purr. An undisturbed elephant party in a Uganda woodland makes a communal purr which they can hear and we cannot. With any disturbance the purr stops. The elephant's alarm call is silence.

Few species have evolved such subtleties, but many have evolved variations. The avocet has one call for the herring gull, its most dangerous predator, another for all others. Song sparrows have three stages of alarm, white-tailed deer four. Despite the unshakable convictions of reinforcement theory, and B. F. Skinner's personal verdict that "an animal must emit a cry at least once for other reasons before the cry can be selected as a warning," alarm calls seem innate. Baby blackbirds, hungry and begging in their nest, will go silent at the parent's alarm. Tinbergen has demonstrated that a herring-gull chick, still inside its unbroken egg, makes begging squeaks which it will silence when the mother gives her alarm.

While the alarm benefits the individual, in a sense it is the property of the group. That the impulse to give the call must have some innate basis becomes most evident when the individual giving the alarm decreases thereby his own chances of survival. An incident that my wife and I observed in the summer of 1968 well illustrates the action that for many biologists represents a paradox in natural selection.

The impala is an antelope little larger than a gazelle and, besides being one of the most beautiful animals in Africa, is one of the most defenseless. While the male carries his swept-back, lyre-shaped horns with splendid defiance, as weapons they are toys for children. In southern Africa the impala is the lion's favorite dish, just large enough to be worth taking, just small enough to demand a minimum of exertion. And so they gather always in herds where all may benefit by the long snort of warning given by the first to sense danger. But that warning may entail a voluntary acceptance of risk.

One afternoon we passed an all-male herd of twenty or twenty-five browsing impala, then a few hundred yards away came on a lioness sleeping under a tree. Approaching her too closely, we disturbed her. She rose, and for the first time was observed by the impala. We could hear the instant far-off snort. No\£ the lioness moved away at deliberate pace toward another tree and another spot of shade. Immediately two impala detached themselves from their fellows and came running after her, sending back to the party repeated warning snorts. When she settled herself again, the two still lingered, watching tensely, giving their occasional snorts. Not until she had most evidently gone back to sleep did they trot away to rejoin their fellows, who never for a moment had stopped eating.

One cannot say that the two impala had accepted risks of a suicidal nature by following a lioness as sleepy as this one. Nevertheless, one can state in very nearly mathematical terms the survival value of approaching or fleeing the presence of a lion of unknown antagonism if you are an impala. The mathematics take on a dramatic tinge if you are a Thomson's gazelle, with a warning system quite different from the impala's snort.

The Tommie, as it is known throughout all of East Africa, is the tourist's delight. Their numbers are uncountable -- in the Serengeti plains at least half a million. Smaller than the impala, they weigh rarely over fifty pounds. Their dark eyes are enormous, comparable only to the paintings of children by Marie Laurencin and her descendant candy-box Paris painters. The Tommie has the additional tourist advantage, which candy-box children do not, of a short little tail wagged in the most ingratiating of circles. But outweighing all other qualities is its supreme disadvantage of being delectable. Tommie meat has been the favorite of human hunters so long as we have hunted. And for far longer than that the little gazelle has been favored by the entire community of savanna predators, even by the lion when no larger game is about. The wonder is that the Tommie so thrives, and perhaps the behavior called "stotting" has contributed to the species' success.

To stot is to warn your fellows of an approaching predator by leaping stiff-legged on all four feet like an animated jumping jack. You can reproduce the behavior by taking thumb and three fingers and bouncing around on a table. So conspicuous are the leaps that a stotting Tommie will spread his warning around a mile of savanna. Yet no alarm could be so dangerous, for if you are being approached by a pack of hunting dogs, its leaders hitting forty-five miles an hour as they come over a rise, then while you spread your alarm you are losing ground at a menacing rate.

There is a temptation to regard a stotting Tommie as stupid, so suicidal may be its situation while spreading the alarm. Were we watching a human situation, we should speak of heroism, but the concept is anthropomorphic as applied to gazelles. What can impel an animal to reduce sharply its own chances of survival, even though the chances of the group be as sharply enhanced?

The question strikes at the heart of older assumptions concerning natural selection, assumptions held by many biologists even today. Since Darwin's time we have seen selection as a process choosing between individuals, the fit from the less fit. A stotting Tommie, in such terms, would be selected out and any such innate tendency in individuals would vanish from the species. Yet we have here on these sweeping East African savannas a superbly successful species in which the trait, far from having been selected against as maladaptive, has become species-specific. The older view of natural selection, formed before population genetics, cannot be applied.

It was a century ago that Alfred Russel Wallace introduced the concept of group selection -- that natural selection in final assessment operates between groups. Wallace, however, was speaking of human groups, in which qualities such as altruism, heroism, sacrifice, mutual loyalty could be valid attributes of a tribe of superior fitness. The problem of the animal remained until 1962, when V. C. Wynne-Edwards published his revolutionary Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior. Wynne-Edwards, of Scotland's University of Aberdeen, is a slim, softly speaking man of utmost distinction, as unlikely a bomb-thrower as ever showed up at an anarchists' drinking party. Yet with his massive book he has emerged as the most controversial figure in the field of evolutionary behavior since Konrad Lorenz first placed his concepts of instinct before a world of hostile psychologists. Unlike Lorenz, however, Wynne-Edwards had so far remained a figure of controversy only within biology itself. Central to his essential challenge is such a statement as this:

In the case of a social group-character, what is passed from parents to offspring is the mechanism, in each individual, to respond correctly in the interests of the community -- not in their own individual interests -- in every one of a wide range of social situations.

Selection may take place, in other words, at an individual level of everyday competition; but it takes place also at a community level, favoring traits of benefit to the community's survival. We may think of a baboon troop under attack, and the willingness of the leaders to risk their lives in the troop's defense. We may think of a nation invaded by an enemy, however superior, and the willingness of young males to take ultimate risk in the territorial defense.

In such terms, and only in such terms, can the Tommie's alarm signal be explained as the product of evolutionary process. It is again a matter of the gene pool, like seed lying invisible beneath a cultivated field, and of society, that visible crop ripening or withering in the sun. Through the long ages of competition between Tommies and predators, like crops and the weather, an unseen competition has gone on between Tom-mie herds. Some produced superior seed. Those populations in which the innate compulsion to give warning ran the strongest most obviously possessed the superior capacity to survive. A quality perhaps once the property of but a few populations spread, through group competition, to become today the property of the species.

Society is the gene pool's testing ground. With fine disregard for individual fate, natural selection must look on the competition of groups for phenotypic evidence as -to how genetic possibilities are working. And while you and I may shudder, at first thought, concerning gods so harsh, on second thought we may look a bit closer and glimpse immortality in our mirror.

The ultimate object of defense in an animal community is the young. A baboon troop seeking food moves like a naval task force across open savanna and through hazardous bush, with mothers and infants near the center where loom the most powerful adult males, like old-time battleships, while scouting destroyers, the juvenile males, leap and chase along the dubious margins of the open, yellow, quivering sea. A bark of the alarm signal will bring the big males, with their concert of fighting teeth, to face whatever threat may exist. The thunderous evolutionary success of the baboon, however, rests not only on the superb defenses of social action, but also on the quickness and adaptability of baboon intelligence.

The elephant, which has already puzzled us enough, offers through another puzzle a clue to a social function which in some species may surpass the importance of defense. Any elephant-watcher in African woodlands must wonder why such tightness of social order is preserved. There are the all-male parties, of course, which young males join on reaching sexual maturity. These are loose, shifting in numbers and membership. But the cows and their young form the parties of a dozen, fifteen, even twenty that one thinks of as the normal elephant herd. Bulls may be evident, but let the observer not be deceived. They are usually adolescents, however enormous, who have yet to escape their mother's rule. And that rule is hard. When we come to discuss the alpha fish, we shall inspect the ordered, inviolable discipline of the cows in an elephant family party. A United States Marine would find little to envy.

A question must rise: Why all the order? Surprise an elephant herd at a distance uncomfortable for both observer and observed. While you are turning your car around (there is hardly a professional driver in Africa, facing elephants at anything resembling close quarters, who will not turn his car or at least assess a direction offering fast escape) the elephants will be making their own rearrangements as well. The young will vanish behind a battlement of adult bodies. Since eyesight is poor, trunks will rise to sniff you out. If tusks rise also, the best advice is to place the car in gear. Still one must ask, What has the elephant to be afraid of? Man has hunted elephants for thefr ivory, it is true, for a good five thousand years. But such subtlety of alarm signal, such social order, seems unlikely to have evolved in such a brief span. In the far past, the massive, extinct saber-tooth cat may have been a threat to the young. But today no killer less than man will go near them. If defense has been the selective factor in the evolution of elephant society, then these vast mobile fortresses, marching through a woodland dusk like mountains gone to war, must be a far more nervous lot than they choose to reveal to casual observers.

Defense, one must conclude, while virtually perfect is still a secondary function in elephant social life. What must be the compulsion for order lying on the elephant herd is not only protection but education of the young. As in many another species of higher animal, and particularly those with slow-growing offspring, the command to learn may rank higher than the command to defend, if groups are to survive. When the national budget of a human group fails to accommodate the demands of education, then we may safely anticipate group competition taking its inevitable toll.

A logic ignored until recent years reveals primacy of education in many a species as the selective factor it is: were the accumulations of learning not of supreme survival value to the adult, then slowness of growing up would be maladaptive, a drag on the energies of group or species militating against survival. The elephant has a life span comparable to man's. The male will be almost twenty years old before he escapes the discipline of the matriarchal family school. But there, under the leadership of the oldest and wisest of cows, he will have learned answers to elephant emergencies never to be forgotten in his long life. And such emergencies may be lethal, for the elephant's mass is its vulnerability. If drought threatens his daily quota of green stuff and water, then he must move perhaps hundreds of miles over ancient trails -- the elephant roads of African lore -- to assured supplies. Man-conducted game reserves may conceal from us the elephant's eternal necessity. But the elephant, denied freedom in his protected state, retains his old-time schooling.

The late, great primate student K. R. L. Hall, of Bristol University, was one of the first to emphasize that primate learning takes place in a social context. The young animal learns not because he is taught, not because as in the laboratories of America he is punished if he fails, rewarded if he succeeds, but because inner necessity drives him to observe, to experience, to remember. He learns much from his mother, and it has been said that a young rhesus monkey knows as much as his mother by the age of one. Yet the great pool of knowledge and experience, exceeding that of any individual member, resides in the group itself.

It was Hall, conducting studies of troops of baboons in a Cape of Good Hope reserve, who released a female baboon brought south from the high-altitude environment of the Transvaal. Foods were different and she had no inkling as to what to eat and what not. Local troops drove her away as they would any stranger. She would have starved had Hall not fed her. Then at last a troop began to tolerate her presence on its fringes. And in two days she learned the entire menu of local diet.

So blocked have we been by the tyranny of reinforcement theory with its rewards and its punishments that today we are only beginning to learn about learning. In a crashing experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles, the iconoclastic zoologist J. Lee Kavanau built a maze with 427 meters of linear runways, 1,205 ninety-degree turns, and openings into 445 blind alleys occupying oyer 50 percent of the space. Into the maze he turned not the domesticated, highly inbred animals that have furnished us with the supposed proof of reinforcement theory, but wild-caught whitefooted mice. Without pressure of deprivation, without threat of punishment or lure of reward, they learned to run the entire maze not only forward but backward in two to three days. "These activities appear to be the expression of inherited tendencies to explore and develop wide-ranging motor activities," wrote Kavanau, "It is unlikely that these remarkable learning performances even begin to approach the capacities of the animals."

The imposing edifice of education not only in America but elsewhere was constructed before our least knowledge of exploratory behavior in animals. And today, as psychology denies the principle of innate aggressiveness in man, it denies at the same time an innate drive to learn and to master problems of the environment. Washburn and Hamburg have written, "Prolonged youth would have no advantage unless the inner drive to activity led to knowledge and skills." They were writing of monkeys. But if the innate drive in monkeys and mice is susceptible to proof, then conclusions must bear some significance to that supreme learner, man.

The crisis in our schools is larger that the educator, the educated, or the perplexed parent can know. Our beleaguered species may face student demonstrations, sit-ins, protest marches, campus violence, school vandalism beyond explanation. Yet we face not only the flaming torches of a new flaming youth but the frozen orthodoxies of educators as ignorant of advances in learning theory as was Neanderthal man of the planted field. And the environmentalist does his considerable best to protect the environment of ignorance.

In the United States the most intelligent, uninhibited laboratory of primate research has been that of Harry Harlow's training ground at the University of Wisconsin. Harlow is an erratic genius of American psychology who, departing at wide angle from behaviorism's mainstream, has led a professional life, I must assume, of quiet desperation. It was he who first demonstrated in the chimpanzee what all ethologists today accept as exploratory behavior. So tall does Harlow stand that to ignore his conclusions becomes impossible. Yet academic fashion has managed to treat demonstrations from Wisconsin with sufficient selectivity so that minimum harm is done.

An early triumph concerned sex. For the environmentalist, denying all innate human compulsions, a thorn bush of a problem is the sexual impulse. But in 1958 from Wisconsin itself came a paper implying that sex is learned. It was by William A. Mason, whose later study of the callicebus monkey I have cited in another book. What Mason presented to the American Psychological Association was an experiment with six rhesus monkeys raised in total isolation and a single wild rhesus caught at the age of twenty months when still sexually immature. Not one of the isolates, deprived of experience, ever achieved sexual effectiveness, whereas the wild monkey matured in normal fashion. The paper became a milestone in environmentalist thought. The doctrine that man is nothing excepting what he learns disposed even of sex. Despite all that has happened since 1958, the paper is still quoted.

None of us -- certainly not I and, I am sure, not Mason -- understood in those days what Hall was later to describe as learning in a social context. But something seemed odd. In 1960 on a visit to Kampala I discussed the perplexity with Niels Bolwig, then lecturer in zoology at Uganda's Makerere University. Bolwig shrugged. He himself had raised two baboons together from birth, one a male, one a female. They had had no contact with adults, yet when the time came for sex they had copulated cheerfully and competently.

What was wrong? The following year Harry and Margaret Harlow, in Natural History, published a long record of their efforts at Wisconsin that seemed to confirm Mason's experiments on a grander scale. The Wisconsin rhesus colony had been established in 1953. No less than fifty-five infants under twelve hours old were placed in isolated cages apd treated like human babies. They thrived so well that the mortality rate was lower than among those raised with mothers. The Harlows intended to turn all into the general breeding stock, but the intention came to nothing. Not a monkey on maturity ever reproduced. Another ninety, raised with surrogate mothers -- mechanical substitutes of one sort or another -- came off little better, though a few reproduced. The answer seemed to lie with some bond of affection between mother and infant laying the ground for later sexual success. This was good enough for the environmentalists, and the Freudians too, and the paper was widely quoted. One could not but be haunted, however, by Bolwig's motherless baboons. And, though overlooked, there was in the Harlow paper more than a hint concerning the importance of play to the young animal.

In November 1962 the Harlows published the paper that from our social view may be regarded as definitive. The importance of the mother -- apparently critical to the emotional development of the infant -- had dominated the preceding paper. Now with the ripening of still another experiment, all earlier fallacies were revealed. The mother remained significant but dispensable; society was compulsory.

The Harlows' large group of monkeys raised in isolation -- animals such as those which had proved to environmentalism's satisfaction that even sex is learned -- were by now five to eight years old, and neurotics to the last monkey. They lived in apathy. For long periods a typical movement would be to clasp hands over their heads and rock back and forth. Compulsive masochism was a behavior norm: some pinched their own skin in the same spot hundreds of times a day, or chewed and tore at their bodies. The Harlows in i960 tried group therapy and put nineteen on the monkey island of a Wisconsin zoo. Fighting at first was severe, but in time things settled down to a relatively normal social system. With the return to the laboratory, however, all improvements disappeared. After two years more the Harlows concluded that the effects of youthful social isolation were irreversible, and that therapy had no lasting value.

In the meantime, their definitive experiment matured. Four infant rhesus monkeys were reared with their mothers in such fashion that the infants had access to one another and normal play. This was the control group. As might be predicted, the infants from the start had lively, uninhibited social relations, at first exploratory, then rough-and-tumble, then flight and pursuit. While even in the first six months brief sexual posturings took place, they became even by the end of the first year more frequent and adult in form. Throughout the second year, even though the monkeys were still immature, a full repertory of adult sexual behavior developed. These young ones, however, still had access to their mothers.

But the experiment also concerned two groups of four infants each, all motherless. From birth they had no contact with adults, no possible access of adult imitation. The Harlows constructed a playroom which artificially reproduced the normal environment of the rhesus monkey. It included climbing and swinging devices, a ladder, movable toys, even an artificial tree. For twenty-three hours and forty minutes of every day each infant was isolated with a surrogate mother built of wire and terry cloth, the device which had so spectacularly failed to encourage the development of normal young. But for twenty minutes a day the infants were allowed access, in groups of four, to the playroom and to each other. Their start was slow. For two months they spent most of their time clinging together, or moving about in a tight group. Then gradually relations relaxed. The same development as among the mothered infants unrolled. By the age of one year their relations and developing sex-play were no different from those of the privileged control group. "No member of the group shows any sign of damage by mother-deprivation."

Adult example offered no least model for the learning of these monkeys. "It seems possible -- even likely -- that the infant-mother affectional system is dispensable, whereas the infant-infant system is the sine qua non for later adjustments in all spheres of monkey life." The social context, in other words, is, as Ronald Hall indicated, the imperative of primate learning. And, as the Harlows demonstrated, such learning develops innately even in an artificially reproduced environment with an abnormal limitation of twenty minutes a day for social exposure.

Learning, like oxygen, is something imbibed from the atmosphere about one. Coded in the genotype are the instructions that as living beings we shall seek, explore, try, dare, stretch our developing capacities in relation to our environment -- and in a social species that environment will consist largely of our fellows. We may benefit from the experience of our elders, partaking of our society's store of wisdom. Conditioning will of course occur as we learn to avoid the painful, to seek the pleasurable. Nor can the positive or negative influence of parents be denied. But we are not the sole product of the parental relationship, as the Freudians would suggest, nor are we the simplistic, identical ciphers that the behaviorists would find convenient. We are beings created unequal ^who through learning come to make the best or the worst of our endowment.

An organized society, if it is just, provides a context of equal opportunity for that learning. Sir Arthur Keith once wrote that child-raising is the first industry of every species, and if the industry fails, then the species drifts to extinction. Failure may overtake us through injustice, through misplaced ideals, through carelessness, through apathy. But just as the society unwilling to defend itself is lost today, so the society incapable of encouraging its young to full development is lost tomorrow.

Before we turn to the third major function of society, let us glance back at what modern biology has made available to us so far. There are the forces of disorder. There is the diversity of our conception, restrained only by the potentialities of our population's gene pool. There is aggressiveness coded into our genetic beginnings -- in less or greater measure, just as all other characters -- that enhances our original diversity by driving us to develop our peculiar endowments. But that aggressiveness -- sometimes lessening, more often exaggerating the inequality of beings -- threatens chaos and annihilation for social species in which individuals are dependent one upon another. And so the social mechanism enters with its balancing forces of order. The most highly endowed or aggressive must sacrifice a portion of his sovereignty to the group if he himself is to survive. The group offers the protection of numbers, but in such fashion that the superior endowments of the few become the survival guarantee for the many. And finally, perhaps in varying importance throughout the species but of invariable importance to man, there is learning. It may consist of participation in the society's pool of past experience or it may include the anticipation of future experience, but in the just society it is available to every member. And it is a force of order, since it brings to the disorder of unequally created beings the vertebrate law of equality of opportunity.

As an ecologist, Wynne-Edwards is centrally preoccupied with the relation of the animal to its environment; and so in his Animal Dispersion the major concern with society is its effectiveness at adjusting animal numbers to the resources of the habitat. It is a subject so large that I shall defer any general consideration. In the course of his book, however, be presents a startling definition: "A society can be defined as a group of individuals competing for conventional prizes by conventional means." In The Territorial Imperative I recorded Wynne-Edwards' definition and suggested that it was so far beyond present comprehension that perhaps it had best be left in the sun to ripen for a while. After four years we may bring the fruit in and see if we can digest it.

Let us recall once again my own definition of a society as a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs. And then, since the best thing about definitions, like hundred-dollar bills, is to have plenty of them, let us consider still another, that of Stuart Altmann. A Canadian, and one of the younger adventurers pressing into the terra incognita of evolutionary behavior, Altmann has already become a world authority in the field of animal communication. And he has done what I have not yet attempted: drawn clear distinction between the population and the society. He defines a population in the classic sense of an interbreeding group the boundaries of which appear at that line where interbreeding drops suddenly to a minimum. Applying the same kind of thinking to society, he defines it as a group of beings in which communication carries understanding. And where communication -- a mutual understanding of signals -- drops off to a minimum, there one encounters the social border.

It follows from Altmann's thinking that the population and the society may coincide. But they may not. What seems a single society may be divided by racial or religious or tribal lines into two or more breeding populations. So long as they speak the same language -- far more significantly in a figurative than in a literal sense -- so long as they enjoy the same signals, pursue the same goals, accept the same rules and regulations, all will go well with the large society. But let communication fail, let a gap of misunderstanding develop along population boundaries, so that the signals, the symbols, the calls or upraised tails, the words or phrases or sounds of music no longer carry a universal meaning, then the gap may become a chasm into which with slow horror the whole society may slip and vanish.

Altmann's definition and that of Wynne-Edwards, far from being incompatible, help to explain each other. For when the Scottish ecologist speaks of conventional prizes, he speaks of goals understood and accepted by all. If you are a male robin, it may be a territory, that patch of land which you defend against intrusion and is exclusively your own. If you are a male jackdaw, then territory may be incomprehensible to you, but the highest rank possible within your flock may be the consummation of heart's desire. And if you are a female robin, of course a male with territory will be your goal, and if you are a female jackdaw, then the attainable male of highest status will be the target in your sexual gunsight. All, male or female, respond to prizes of value understood by all. Yet the prizes are conventional in that they are symbols of worth. The robin's territory may include a certain convenience of food supply. The jackdaw's status may the more readily assist him in acquiring a resounding mate. But the competition is neither for food nor for mates. It is for conventional prizes bearing such value as society disposes.

Wynne-Edwards speaks of prizes "pursued by conventional means." Society proscribes certain means of competition detrimental to its own survival. "Thou shalt not kill" has been a social proscription written not just into the Judeo-Christian commitments but into the commandments of virtually every human community on earth. Unwritten but understood is a comparable clause in the social contracts of monkeys and wolves, of gulls and hyenas; it was understood by the armies of Joshua: "Thou shalt not kill -- except members of other societies."

In terms of Wynne-Edwards' definition, the competition of beings becomes the salient premise. Competition must and will take place at all levels of life. From the competition of sperm in the female genital tract to the competition of the aging with the grasping forces of oblivion, from the competition of children for parental attention to the competition of peers in the play yard or sports field, from the competitions of women in dress and figure to the competitions of men for power and prestige we deal with a never ending process common to all species. Nor could its universality be otherwise, resting as it does on the natural diversity of beings and the innate force pressing us to select and fulfill whatever varied potentials we may possess. The Utopian may deny competition as a necessary condition of man. But had we been that pioneer animal lacking the quality, we should never have emerged onto the forest margins of our Miocene beginnings.

Accepting the competition of sexually reproducing beings, then we may understand Wynne-Edwards' view of the social function, as well as Altmann's staking of the social border. Through means of mutual understanding, a group regulates the competition among its members so that we strive for symbolic prizes according to rules and regulations presumably fair to all. Beyond the border where communication fails, however, the prizes galvanizing our society may lie beyond another's comprehension. For East Africa's Masai tribe possession of cattle may symbolize high status, while for the neighboring Kik-uyu it is the pursuit of political power and large black cars. Each is slightly mad in the view of the other. The prize of one society may lie in numbers of wives, in another in numbers of acres, in another in the numbers of a Swiss bank account. Within a single society times may change: the lure of the court and the warrior's way, together with a scorn for money and commerce, may give way to the ascendancy of industry and accumulated wealth, which with further tidal changes may in turn give way to the prizes of high management, economic or political.

All are conventional prizes meaningful to social partners, tying society together by mutual ambitions and mutual strivings, even mutual envies. But they must be pursued within social covenants agreed on by all. Here then is the third social function -- leading to the cliche phrase "law and order" -- which accepts competition as inescapable but by means of conventions preserves the degree of order essential for survival of the group.

The function of society as a playing field governed as in any other sport by goals and rules may seem of less compelling reward to the individual than the functions of defense and education. Yet these are the rules that protect him from the depredations of his fellows, as concerted defense protects him from the depredations of others. And there is more to it than that. Perhaps we might resurrect a hypothesis of innate needs that I projected toward the close of The Territorial Imperative.

I suggested that in all higher animals, including man, there are basic, inborn needs for three satisfactions: identity, stimulation, and security. I described them in terms of their opposites: anonymity, boredom, and anxiety. They vary in hierarchy, since the need of the female for security must quite apparently be greater than in the male. The endowment and experience of the individual must likewise dictate varying degrees of this need or that. To a surprising degree, however, security ranks lowest among our needs, and the more thoroughly we achieve it, the more willingly do we sacrifice it for stimulation. So long as we live in a milieu of material deprivation, the illusion that security is paramount will enclose us; and many an error of social philosophy has so been written. But let even a minimum of affluence replace deprivation's demands, and security will give way to boredom, a condition to be avoided.

To a degree as surprising as the low rank of security in the hierarchy of need is the high place of identity. To know who you are; to achieve identification in the eyes of your social partners; to sense a fulfillment of the uniqueness that in truth was once yours as a fertilized egg: I submit that it is the ultimate motive. How many people do you know who, given the choice between fame and fortune, will not choose fame? Only when we encounter and accept the ultimate frustration, anonymity, do we turn down the steps of basic needs to the search for mere stimulation, just as we turn up the steps to search for it when, with security satisfied, we encounter boredom.

Let us for the moment accept the triad of innate needs as a hypothesis and no more. It will take on greater credibility, I believe, and as a hypothesis more reliable predictive power, as we proceed through later stages of this investigation. At this point let us content ourselves with inspecting the psychological function of society in the satisfaction of individual need. For I maintain that a society so designed as to present its members with equal opportunity to achieve identity, stimulation, and security will survive the trials of group selection; whereas one that fails in its psychological function will, in the long competition, be selected out.

Protection of the individual from outward enemies; protection, through education, of every member's right, according to vertebrate law, to equal opportunity for developing his potential; and protection of members, one from another, as through competition they seek psychological satisfaction of their innate needs: these are the three functions of order which any society must provide for its members if individuals and society are alike to survive. They are as true of the societies of any higher animals -- and in particular of the family of primates -- as they are of that highest primate, man. In non-human societies, through stronger instinctive control, they are in a sense self-operating. In human societies, through neglect or design, they are less so.

From most ancient times we have recognized the demands of outward defense and internal order. They are closest to our evolutionary origins. In more recent times of technological advance we have recognized or begun to recognize the educational imperative, and the inarguable truth that the strongest and most durable of societies will be founded on the maximum development of its members. But not even now do we begin to recognize the psychological function -- to glimpse even dimly that as security is enhanced, so are boredom and anonymity. The very conquests of production which today promise to reduce material anxiety from human preoccupation have ignored or repressed other innate needs of the individual.

And we do not know what we are doing. There is no contemporary disaster to compare with the bankruptcy of human reason in its confrontation with the human being. The perceptions of the Elizabethan theater, almost five centuries ago, offered insights more profound concerning the nature of man.

In simple bewilderment we watch the spread of violence through what once were peaceful streets. We note in anguish the rise of crime unprecedented in America; and we blame it on our racial problems while ignoring its rise in lands where race is no factor; or we blame it on poverty, forgetting that in the 1930's, when poverty was a common possession, crime was endurable. Earnestly we grope for clues to explain the revolt of the young, the persuasions of alcoholism, hallucinatory drugs, pornography. Explanations become dust even as we touch them. Yet why should such a simple explanation elude our reason?

The hungry psyche has replaced the hungry belly.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of The Confessions wrote, "I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mold in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book."

That all men are different; that nature, through sexual recombination, breaks every mold in which men are cast: neither comment detracts from a mad night's accident that could present to mankind a Rousseau. His autobiography, one of the most enthralling books ever written, with breathtaking conviction confirms the assertion. He was a variant of the first order, a genius scorned, humiliated, pursued, enshrined, a loner whose influence can be compared to few since the time of Christ. His influence on our own time can be compared to none.

Rousseau conducted his passionate meditations a century before Darwin, yet he saw man with equivalent clarity as a being rooted in nature. He distrusted democracy yet bequeathed to the world the principle that government is the servant of the governed. No atheist, still he dethroned God and placed human destiny in the hands of society; both Catholic and Protestant churches responded with equal savagery. No man to be cowed, he spoke against tyranny and for the sovereignty of the individual as none other in his century. And yet, with The Social Contract, he presented what was scarcely a contract at all but a document of surrender of the individual to the group. When Dobzhansky writes, "The philosophy of modern democracies, of Western and Eastern varieties as well, is the doctrine of equality, natural goodness, and the limitless perfectibility of man," with a certain reservation all is purest Rousseau. Perfectibility was to be the contribution of the nineteenth century. But as the image of God may be viewed from a thousand angles, so the image of Rousseau inhabits our day.

And the image well may inspire the future as well. Should any doubt it, they have only to read a roaring summation by the Durants:

First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement. . . . But what shall we mean by the Romantic movement? The rebellion of feeling against reason, of instinct against intellect, of sentiment against object, of solitude against society, of myth and legend against history, ... of emotional expression against conventional restraints, of individual freedom against social order, of youth against authority, of democracy against aristocracy, of man against state.

The Durants' catalog of revolt, one image of Rousseau, forms a useful checklist for measuring his reincarnation in the spirit of the contemporary young. With the ebb of the Romantic tide many an idol was carried out to sea, never, we thought, to be seen again. But with the tide's new flow we watch the same old breakers crashing on the same old beaches.

Such a spirit as the Durants record stemmed largely from his earlier work, Discourse on Inequality, often known as the Second Discourse, which he published in 1755. In it he analyzed primal men as equal and good, the coming of property rights as the source of inequality, and society as the final instrument of ruin created to perpetuate inequality. In 1762 he presented The Social Contract as the revolutionary society in which, property abolished, individuals surrender all sovereignty to "the general will," thus regaining as fully as possible the amity and equality of their origins. The principle was to reappear as the mystique, if not the reality, of the totalitarian state.

Rousseau's work appeared over a century before Darwin's Descent of Man, whereas mine appears just a century afterward. And if I have taken his title and dedicated this work to his memory, it is to throw into sharpest relief just what the natural sciences have brought to our understanding of man and the group. In many a way his mind was remarkably modern. He saw man, as I have mentioned, as a portion of nature. He looked to human origins for better understanding of the human outcome. From many a hint one may gather that he pondered over the way of the animal as of significance to the way of man, and one must bow to a visionary who centuries before the coming of ethology glimpsed a truth. And finally one must recognize that Rousseau's objective, no less nor more than my own, looked to nature and natural law for human solutions.

In a sense he asked all the right questions. But he asked them too soon. Without the theory of evolution to guide him, without the past century's assimilation of proven conclusions in the natural sciences, and in particular without the explosion of the past two or three decades that has transformed biology into virtually a new science, Rousseau could use only his intuitions concerning the nature of nature. And never could a man have guessed so disastrously wrong. In The Second Discourse he saw primal man as

wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without war and liaisons, with no need of his fellow man, likewise with no desire to harm them, perhaps never even recognizing anyone individually.

Fifty hens in a barnyard flock know each other individually. Even Darwin's cattle would be skeptical.

Males and females united fortuituously, depending on encounter, occasion, and desire. . . . His appetite satisfied, the man no longer needs a given woman, nor the woman a given man. . . . One goes off in one direction, the other another, and there is no likelihood that at the end of nine months they have any memory of having known each other.

It is impossible, in that primitive state, that a man would sooner have need of another man than a monkey or wolf of its fellow creature.

Rousseau's vision of asocial primal man became his founding fallacy. He could not know that not a species in our primate family since the early pro-simian, the mouse lemur, has led a solitary life. He could not know that life in organized societies is so characteristically the animal way that a few brief references to such species as the leopard have been sufficient to dispose of those capable of solitary existence. He could not know that xenophobia in a state of nature is as common as the grouping of familiars.

"Man is born free, yet everywhere we see him in chains" is the celebrated opening line of The Social Contract. Yet more definitive of Rousseau's thought is the opening line of Emile, published the same year and a work he regarded as more important. Since critics are frequently accused of distorting his meaning in translation, I quote it in French:

Que la nature a fait I'homme heureux et bon, mais que la societe le deprave et le rend miserable.

With the opening sentence of Emile the Age of the Alibi was launched: Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault. Rousseau's founding fallacy that primal man knew no society is compounded by the second assumption that man in a state of nature was happy and good. That Rousseau knew nothing of the territorial imperative in animal life and regarded the invention of private property as the curse man brought on himself becomes a minor ignorance.

What I believe should be stressed is that Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his time had every right to be wrong. How could he know that natural men were created unequal, or that original goodness is as unlikely as original equality? How could he know that the institution of privately defended property, like the institution of society, was an evolutionary invention far antedating man and his whole primate family? How could he know in the days before Dart that man was descended from predatory primates who killed for a living? Not even Darwin knew that.

The catastrophe is not that Rousseau was wrong but that after two centuries we are wrong; that biological advances since Darwin's time have penetrated our thinking not at all; that fashions of thought today are as firmly grounded in the Rousseau fallacies as if the natural sciences had never existed. In his essay on Rousseau the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote:

All contemporary social struggles are still moved and driven by this original stimulus. They are rooted in that consciousness of the responsibility of society which Rousseau was the first person to possess and which he implanted in posterity.

The Social Contract projected that stimulus. Rousseau reasoned that we cannot return to primal man's state; we must accept society as here to stay. But we can arrange a society abolishing property and its consequent evil, a society to which every man abandons himself freely and totally, thereby achieving equality. The "general will" must govern our conduct. And who shall interpret the general will? "It is the best and most natural rule that the wisest should govern the multitude, when there is assurance that they will govern for its welfare and not for their own." And government of the people, by the people? "If there were a nation of gods, they might be governed by a democracy. So perfect a government will not agree with men."

It is difficult to accept Rousseau as a Utopian; his belief in his own social contract seems to me more a matter of making the best of a bad job. A Karl Marx might develop the notion of perfectibility, and that such a society would produce a new kind of man. For Rousseau society itself was anathema, and his contract would at least provide an improvement. But the only Utopia lay in the past.

The reality of Rousseau's philosophy is its pessimism, and this seems to be too little understood. Man is a downhill being. Again, from Emile: "L'homme qui medite est un animal deprave." The statement has sometimes been discounted as extreme. Yet in a letter written five years after The Social Contract he said much the same: "I am sure that my heart loves only good. All the evil I ever did in my life was the result of reflection; and the little good I have been able to do was the result of impulse."

I must confess my own failure to apprehend Rousseau's pessimism until I encountered the ungentle hand and the unbowed mind of my own Devil's Advocate, Roger D. Masters, the special editor of my choice for this entire volume. A professor of political science at Dartmouth College, Masters is young, slim, with a black beard as formidable as his intellect. Whereas in another generation we had the pioneer thrusting his way through our western wilderness, today we have a Masters pressing through an academic wilderness to establish the biological foundations of political science. His unseen contributions to this inquiry lie hidden on every page. But as a world authority on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his contribution to these paragraphs must receive particular mention, as must his limited liability. We are far from being in perfect agreement on all interpretations. But it has been Masters who has revealed to me the similar inspiration investing Rousseau's work and my own. And it is Masters who has pointed to Jean-Jacques' inevitable pessimism.

The organizing principle of Rousseau's life was his unshakable belief in the original goodness of man, including his own. That it led him into most towering hypocrisies, as recorded in The Confessions, is of no shaking importance; such hypocrisies must follow from such an assumption. More significant are the disillusionment, the pessimism, and the paranoia that such a belief in human nature must induce. That Rousseau was persecuted for his views, by church and state alike, is a story of horror. But that he quarreled with his friends, suspected those who helped him most, must be the romantic's bitter fulfillment. Exiled from the continent, he was helped to London by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who even arranged that Ramsay should paint his portrait. It hangs in Edinburgh today, but Rousseau, infuriated by what seemed to him calculation in the eyes, sensed insult and conspiracy and quarreled with Hume as he quarreled with all. My wife has redrawn the portrait in a fashion that we believe would have better pleased its subject.

I scarcely need state that my own devotion to human rationality is less than limitless. But never would I deny the power of reason to probe and investigate our human ingredients and through comprehension become a force for good. The vision of man as a fallen angel must to me be the most hopeless of all philosophies. A belief in our original goodness leaves the man that we know as far beyond comprehension as he is beyond help. We become inexcusable monsters; and we must accept Rousseau's verdict that the man who thinks is un animal de-pravi. For such a being, perhaps, there could be. nothing but the social contract as he describes it, a total order. Ours are enforced with an abundance of tanks and machine guns.

What Rousseau introduced to modern man, of course, was the philosophy of the impossible. And what must discourage the observer is that after two centuries of invalidation, from the French Revolution to the rape of Prague, we yet do not recognize it for what it is. There remains time, I believe, however, for debate. Is it truly society that corrupts man? Or man who corrupts society? Is there no alternative to Rousseau's total order other than the adolescent dream of total disorder? I myself believe that evolution itself, playing upon us with laws too large for us to see, provides the answer.

Order and disorder are intimately entwined. Without that degree of order which only society can provide, the vulnerable individual perishes. Yet without that degree of disorder tolerating and promoting to fullest development the diversity of its members, society must wither and vanish in the competitions of group selection. What contemporary evolutionary thought can bring to social philosophy is the demonstrable need for structured disorder within the larger structures of order.

I have described Rousseau's The Social Contract as not a contract at all but a document inscribing the total surrender of disorder to order. That it violates natural law may be read in its failure to become a social reality without guns and policemen. What we may observe is that the individual has obligations to the group, as the group has obligations to the individual: it is a contract in equity. We shall proceed to explore those obligations more fully, but first we should recognize a paradox. At the heart of the true contract it is the individual who to exist must have the order of numbers; the group that to exist must have the disorder of diversity. By no accident does the tyrant found his powers on the mob; by no coincidence is freedom protected by the constitution of the group.

A contract in equity, delicately balancing the shifting needs proposed by environment's contingencies, is the fluid bloodstream of a lasting social order. We are less than gods, and Jean-Jacques was correct. We are a portion of nature, and again he was correct. But there is no more severe distinction between my social contract and his than that Rousseau's was an agreement between fallen angels, while mine is one between risen apes. His was a charter for downhill beings whose best times lay inevitably in the past. Mine, granted all cynicism, remains a compact of beings on their way up. His was one to prevent absolute degradation. Mine is one that, accepting the human being, accepts likewise a future that we cannot know. But seeks, in faith dubious but no less real, to encourage it.