along the Gulf Coast of Texas or a major prairie fire along their migration pathway could still take them over the brink. However, through the subjective evaluation of humans it was determined that one species should be saved while such a commitment was lacking on behalf of the other. Thus, we have very different outcomes; an objectively defined outcome in one case and a subjectively defined outcome in the other. Statistics provide a good measure of the one, while the other is best represented by anecdote. Obviously, the two mechanisms demonstrate a significant asymmetry in evaluation processes.

Anecdotal assessments tie directly to our facilities for metaphorical understanding. Consider another situation. Amber Alert is a national program aimed at quickly disseminating alerts when a child has been abducted. As described on the Amber Alert Web site presented by the United States Department of Justice: “AMBER stands for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response and was created as a legacy to 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas, and then brutally murdered.” This particular episode became so illustrative of an innate fear within the basic family unit, which is, having a child abducted and killed, that it engendered a national response. Given that orders of magnitude more children are killed each year in traffic accidents than through abduction, the response might be viewed as disproportionate. However, the rationale is rooted in the subjective assessment of the human emotional system, not in objective, dispassionate statistics.

Social Ecosystems

All life, certainly including members of Homo sapiens, exists within physical ecosystems. While we might not typically think of it as such, in fact a physical ecosystem provides an environment through which policy derived from physical laws is implemented. We’ll get in to this in much more detail a bit later, but consider for the moment that aspect of policy which entails the rules that govern interactions. We often view rules as arbitrary concepts. However, consider that rules which take on an immutable property we call laws and we can perhaps understand the policy of a physical ecosystem as one in which the laws of nature prevail. When living entities are considered within a physical ecosystem, particularly entities that are capable of voluntary action driven by their cognitive facilities, then the concept of rules does take on the more arbitrary character that occurred to us in the first place. The greater the cognitive abilities of the species, the richer are the rules of policy governing the interactions of that species. It would seem that when we get to the complex, and, in many instances, almost perversely arbitrary nature of human interactions, we need to establish a different characterization of an ecosystem through which to analyze and understand these interactions. Hence our characterization of a social ecosystem, viewed here from a new angle.

Social ecosystems extend beyond the physical, and in so doing they allow for policy considerations of human interactions whose impetus derives from beyond purely physical initial conditions and proceeds according to other than physical laws. These policy considerations allow for significantly more complex and seemingly arbitrary rules governing the conduct for interactions, but of course, which may ultimately resolve to the physical as well.

As we discussed in the last chapter, there is evidence that the human species has evolved not only through natural selection at an individual level, but also through natural selection within and among groups. While the whole concept of among-group selection as a natural evolutionary mechanism is still a subject of active discussion and research, what is not ambiguous is that throughout the entire breadth of the recorded existence of the human species, there have been

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