Introduction

In what sense is society like an organism or a population of organisms? In what way is the evolution of the state from less organized collectivities like the evolution of multicellular organisms from unicellular ones? In what way is the increase in frequency of nuclear families in modern Western societies like the change in frequency of light wing coloration in populations of peppered moths? Such questions mark the promise and raise the problems of analogies between the domains of biology and the social sciences.