Clearly reproductive selection is the most important selective influence in present social evolution.
Men act and suffer jointly. Man is a social animal, and he is such through adaptation. Primitive man, like many lower animals, associates himself with others for mutual protection and support. Hence the strength of tribal attachment and of clannishness. To group selection chiefly is to be attributed capacity for cooperation and those feelings of regard for others on which morality is based. The attachment of mother and child is primeval and of course strongest. But the family, created by the presence of the father, is the earliest persistent, truly social group. Still more characteristically social is the bond of union between grown-up brothers and sisters. Out of kinship grouping has grown the broader, though vaguer and less intense, recognition of fellowship contained in morality. Morality has been called the egoism of the group. When developed and refined, it is much more than that, but it is based upon the instinct that draws men together.
Group selection is probably at its best in primitive man. Bagehot's classic discussion of the evolution of a coercive social organization is an application of group selection. But in modern occidental society the process of individualistic atomization has been carried so far as to threaten the disintegration even of the family. Large family, clan, tribe and village community are gone. There is left little but the individual, or the natural family, and the state. What "groups" there are between the state and the family are largely mere expressions of an appetite for association which finds no other and more important object upon which to exercise itself. And the state is of no importance for group selection. It has become a thing of contrivance and a matter of social psychology. The family is the only group left that is of much selectional importance. Of progressive national states there are too few, in the face of the many questions to be answered, to offer the necessary material. And they interpenetrate by migration in a way to defeat selection groupwise.
Selective dissociation is so closely related to selection, and so often confounded with it, that it requires mention here. There is selective dissociation where individuals of more or less similar traits are segregated from others and put into a special environment of a nature to affect their survival.[1] The incidence of the forms of selection varies with geographical region and social class. The process of dissociation is not directly selection, but only indirectly important as its preliminary.
Economic and social rise has been mentioned as often confused with "survival." Survival it is not, but merely selective dissociation
- ↑ The term "dissociation" is used by C. C. Closson in articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vols. X. and XI.
