The roots of group feeling and group identity have to be looked for at very basic levels in evolved human psychology and perhaps even further back in patterns of group behaviour in animals. The nation state has shown astonishing power to survive universalist ideologies and also to resist the strong forces working towards towards globalisation of the world economy and of world culture. In the same way as once it was said that 'prebyter is old priest writ large' one might say that 'nation is group writ large'. There are common elements between a society and Society but the forces promoting or constituting the unity of the national group may differ significantly from those supporting the unity, the identity, of the smaller group. What seems to be most noticeable in the national group, in the present revival of nationalism, is the importance of language as the foundation of nation identity. If language, and languages, are essentially biological and not simply cultural phenomena, then it may be possible to understand more fully how the national idea retains its force, and indeed to start to think of the nation in its turn as an evolutionary grouping. The work of Cavalli-Sforza and his associates at Stanford on the correlations between world linguistic and genetic distributions seem relevant.