human societies sometimes cooper-ate closely in insectan fashion, but more frequently they compete for the limited resources allocated to their role sector. The best and the most entrepreneurial of the role actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards while the least successful are displaced to other less desirable positions. "22 But this description completely ignores the immense amount of sharing of resources that occurs among a whole variety of modern hunting and gathering societies like Eskimos, and it completely distorts the history even of Europe. The concept of entrepreneurship does not work for, say, the thirteenth century in the Île-de-France, an agrarian feudal society in which land could not be bought and sold, in which labor could not be hired and fired, and in which the so-called market mechanism was a rudimentary form of exchange of a few goods. Of course, sociobiologists recognize that there are exceptions to these generalizations, but their claim is that those exceptions are temporary and unnatural, and that they will not persist in the absence of constant force and threat. So, societies may indeed, like blue-clad regimented Chinese, cooperate in so-called insectan fashion. But this can be managed only by constant supervision and force. The moment one relaxes one's vigil, people will revert to their natural ways. It is rather as if we could make a law saying that everyone would have to walk on their knees, which would be physically possible but terribly painful. The moment we relaxed our vigil, everyone would stand upright again. At the surface of this theory of human nature is the obvious ideological commitment to modern entrepreneurial competitive hierarchical society. Yet underneath is a deeper ideology, and that is the priority of the individual over the collective. Despite the name sociobiology, we are dealing with a theory not of social causation but of individual causation. The characteristics of society are seen as caused by the individual properties that its members have, and those properties, as we shall see, are said to derive from the members' genes. If human societies engage in war, that is because each individual in the society is aggressive. If men as a group dominate women or whites Blacks, it is because each man as an individual is desirous of dominating each woman and each white person has feelings of personal hostility set off by the sight of Black skin. The structures of society simply reflect these individual predispositions. Society is nothing but the collection