What are the social differences between animal society and human socie...
Distinguish between animal and human society:
(a) Animal Society : Among animals, society is to thrive over a time. Its members most behave in ways which will enable them (i) To meet their own physical needs in terms of their kind, and (ii) to integrate their activities (including whatever division of labour exists, whether it be simple or complex).
To meet above three minimum requirements for survival, animals depend largely upon institutional learning and communication.
(b) Human Society : (i) Turning to a human society, we recognise that for continued existence it also meets the same sort of basic conditions as required in an animal society.
(ii) Human cannot escape the effect of biological inheritance any more than the bees can.
(iii) Just as the biological inheritance of the bees determines their physical needs, behaviour - patterns, learning and communicating -capacities, likewise, human society is also tied to man's biological inheritance.
However it is this very biological inheritance which makes possible the enormous differences between human beings and animals.
(iv) Particularly to be stressed are man's infinitely greater learning, remembering and abstracting capacities - and his infinitely greater communicating capacities. Because of these capacities, we find man meeting his minimum social, survival needs, primarily through learned behaviour which does not come ready-made but it invented and transmitted through communitions.
(v) This meeting of the basic conditions of continued existence by means of learned
normative behaviour rather than primarily by hereditary mechanism constitutes the major differences between human and animal societies.
(vi) It follows that because of this dependence upon learned, normative behaviour, a new survival need emerges. The continuation of social system itself. This prerequistite for the continuance of a human socity must also be met through learned, normative behaviour. (vii) We see this (referred in previous paragraph) operating mainly in the society's patterned ways of socializing the young (enabling them to acquire their group's values and behaviour patterns) -Gemeinschaft (Community) and, Gesellschaft (Society).