There is one crucial difference between the principles of social organization
and that of the individual person: a society’s parts are very widely interchangeable, a person’s only slightly so. The central nervous system cells, for
example, perform many functions of coordinating information and executing
adaptive action which other cells cannot do. A society, on the other hand,
has a multiple-replacement capacity, such that many persons can perform
the analogous information-coordination and executive functions on behalf
of society-as-organism. Furthermore, that regularity of patterned behavior
which we call culture depends relatively more on the ability of constituent
units autonomously to perceive the system of which they are a part, to receive
and transmit information, and to act in accordance with the necessities of
the system, than on any all-embracing central administration which stimulates specialized parts to perform their function.