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If organisms could develop over time according to discernible, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. Human society was compared to a biological organism, and social science equivalents of concepts like variation, natural selection, and inheritance were introduced as factors resulting in the progress of ...
Weaver ants, here collaborating to pull nest leaves together, can be considered eusocial, as they have a permanent division of labor. E. O. Wilson extended the concept to include other social insects, such as ants, wasps, and termites. Originally, it was defined to include organisms (only invertebrates) that fulfilled the same three criteria ...
Social organism is a sociological concept, or model, wherein a society or social structure is regarded as a "living organism". Individuals interacting through the various entities comprising a society, such as law, family, crime, etc., are considered as they interact with other entities of the society to meet its needs. Every entity of a ...
The 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer coined the term super-organic to focus on social organization (the first chapter of his Principles of Sociology is entitled "Super-organic Evolution" [14]), though this was apparently a distinction between the organic and the social, not an identity: Spencer explored the holistic nature of society as a social organism while distinguishing the ways in ...
Charles Darwin considered the evolution of eusociality a major problem for his theory of natural selection. In The Origin of Species, he described the existence of sterile worker castes in the social insects as "the one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable and actually fatal to my whole theory". In the next paragraph of ...
The mouse lemur is a nocturnal, solitary-but-social lemur native to Madagascar. Solitary-but-social animals forage separately, but some individuals sleep in the same location or share nests. The home ranges of females usually overlap, whereas those of males do not. Males usually do not associate with other males, and male offspring are usually ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
A bear with a salmon. Interspecific interactions such as predation are a key aspect of community ecology.. In ecology, a community is a group or association of populations of two or more different species occupying the same geographical area at the same time, also known as a biocoenosis, biotic community, biological community, ecological community, or life assemblage.