, that adaptation
is an effect of competition, while accommodation, or more properly
social accommodation, is the result of conflict.

The outcome of the adaptations and accommodations, which the struggle
for existence enforces, is a state of relative equilibrium among the
competing species and individual members of these species. The
equilibrium which is established by adaptation is biological, which
means that, in so far as it is permanent and fixed in the race or the
species, it will be transmitted by biological inheritance.

The equilibrium based on accommodation, however, is not biological; it
is economic and social and is transmitted, if at all, by tradition. The
nature of the economic equilibrium which results from competition has
been fully described in chapter viii. The plant community is this
equilibrium in its absolute form.

In animal and human societies the community has, so to speak, become
incorporated in the individual members of the group. The individuals are
adapted to a specific type of communal life, and these adaptations, in
animal as distinguished from human societies, are represented in the
division of labor between the sexes, in the instincts which secure the
protection and welfare of the young, in the so-called gregarious
instinct, and all these represent traits that are transmitted
biologically. But human societies, although providing for the expression
of original tendencies, are organized about tradition, mores, collective
representations, in short, _consensus_. And consensus represents, not
biological adaptations, but social accommodations.

Social organization, with the exception of the order based on
competition and adaptation, is essentially an accommodation of
differences through conflicts. This fact explains why diverse-mindedness
rather than like-mindedness is characteristic of human as distinguished
from animal society. Professor Cooley's statement of this point is
clear:

The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization, in the fact of reciprocal influence or causation
among its parts, by virtue of which everything that takes place
in it is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome
of the whole.[222]

The distinction between accommodation and adaptation is illustrated in
the difference between domestication and taming. Through domestication
and breeding man has modified the original inheritable traits of plants
and