Emergent evolution and the social / by William Morton Wheeler.

  • William Morton Wheeler
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Emergent evolution and the social / by William Morton Wheeler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/68 page 31
    and conscious activities, striking social emergents make their appearance spora¬ dically and often in unrelated groups of species, as I have shown among the insects.1 Indeed, the correlations of the social—using the term in its most general sense—even extend down through the inorganic realm to the very atom with its organization of component electrons. And since reality is given as classes of elements, each represented by innumer¬ able similar, active entities, endowed with an irresistible tendency to cohere and organize themselves into more and more complex emergent wholes, association may be regarded as the fundamental condition of emergence. We are, I believe, bound to assume that the organization is entirely the work of the components themselves and that it is not initiated and directed by extraspacial and extratemporal “ entelechies ” (Driesch) “ organizatory factors ” (Eldridge), “deity” or “elan vital” (Bergson). 1 This matter is fully discussed in my Social Life among the Insects, 1923, and Insect Societies (International Library of Psychology, etc.) 1928.
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