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Updated: May 25, 2025
The evolution of the wonderfully varied societies found among insects begins with the solitary insect itself, just as this, viewed as a cell-community, originates from one-celled beginnings like Amoeba through progressive evolution in time.
Another most important class in the cell-community is the great group of the blood-corpuscles, which in some respects appear to maintain their independence and freedom to a greater degree than almost any other class which can be found in the body.
The similarity between social insects and human associations is clearer than in the case of a comparison between an example from either group and a cell-community, because the higher forms lack the organic contact of the components which is so prominent a feature in the lower instance.
We may justly compare the queen to the reproductive organ of Hydra, for the values to the life of the species are identical in the two cases, while the various classes of workers are counterparts of such units as the muscle and nerve and nutritive components of the Hydra or any other cell-community individual.
The bomb-throwing cells die immediately after they have ejected their missiles; like soldiers participating in a forlorn hope, they sacrifice their lives in one supreme effort of service to the cell-community of which they are members.
Some of the transitional forms have been specified to show how the second kind originates from the first, and how in its turn this grows in time into the third and most complex association; thus Vorticella and Volvox connect Amoeba with the cell-community individual like Hydra and a solitary wasp, while the annually established colonies of social wasps and of bumblebees lead to the permanent colony-individual.
Restricting attention to the three primary examples, and remembering that the criterion of completeness is the ability to discharge satisfactorily all of the eight biological tasks, it is clear that the entire Hydra and the whole ant-community correspond physiologically with Amoeba, although the first-named is structurally a cell-community equivalent to many protozoa, and the insect colony is composed of many such cell-communities as elements.
In explaining the phylogenetic origin of the gastraea in the light of this ontogenetic process, we may assume that the one-layered cell-community of the blastaea began to take in food more largely at one particular part of its surface. Natural selection would gradually lead to the formation of a depression or pit at this alimentary spot on the surface of the ball.
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