Although there is a question as to whether Morgan understood this basic difference. The ideology of evolutionism, which has developed in the last two hundred years, has permeated all the natural and social sciences, including anthropology, biology, cosmology, linguistics, sociology, and thermodynamics. This means that the above mentioned function of selection is not the function of environment but the function of organism and environment. Thus, the relation between the individual and society, like the relation between organism and environment, is a dialectical one. It is not only that society is the environment of the individual and therefore perturbs and is perturbed by the individual.
Society is also hierarchically related to individuals.
The more detailed argumentation of this Sapir's statement starts with the subject of social sciences, with their difference from the subject of natural science. Those who study socialized behavior face some obvious and unanswerable criticism which they must be hard-boiled enough to resist. The field of understanding of sociological human behavior is difficult, and we must resist the objective of refinement of technique. But we cannot wait until our data are carefully sifted so as to be all a hundred percent suitable for statistical applications. We are interested in the meanings for the individual of the patterns which culture recognizes, and this is a bastard field.