Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high
and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but,
in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which
she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to
represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far
from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive
characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we
come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find
that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact,
the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her
incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of
motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore,
that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the
individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception,
but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case
of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case
of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from
either the animal or the vegetable world. Natural selection, of which
the continuance of the race is the first and never neglected concern,
invariably sees to it that no individuals are allowed to be produced by
any species unless they have survival-value, a phrase which always
means, in the upshot, value for the survival of the race--whether as
parents, or foster-parents, protectors of the parents, feeders or slaves
thereof.
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