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that mirror those painted in the caves of Africa, Europe and, for that matter, North America. So, we have related our inquiries into the grouping mechanisms of the human species to the symbolism that forms the foundation for our very thought processes.

What we believe we’ve learned from studying the works, each quoted in the bibliography, of a variety of fields, including among others anthropology, archeology, evolutionary biology, neurology, physiology, and developmental psychology, is a sequence of enabling events that have occurred roughly according to the following progression. Biological organisms were founded on self-contained instructions embedded in a language that provides for maintenance of a history of past construction and a blueprint for future construction of the organisms themselves. These instructions are susceptible to changes that allow for profound shifts in functional capabilities as well as fine grained adaptation to environmental conditions. An objective evaluation mechanism enables the preferential progression of successive collections of entities, each with incrementally different and adapted facilities for dealing with their physical ecosystem. These change and evaluation mechanisms ultimately gave rise to the vertebrates, and hence to mammals, and ultimately to hominids. A characteristic of mammals is a system of emotion that provides more nuanced response stimuli to sensory input and consequently facilitates more effective grouping mechanisms than were found in previous species. When physiological capabilities in the hominid brain allowed expanded exploitation of, among other facilities, mirror neuron complexes, the mind was provided at least one, but perhaps more mechanisms to form, store and easily recall specific contexts for the sensori-motor experiences that it encountered and subsequently represented through symbolic expression. This gave rise to the ability to evaluate and manipulate these symbols through large-scale metaphoric reasoning which in turn formed the basis of the higher level cognitive processes that support the ascendance of the species, ultimately giving rise to the sub-species of modern humans termed Homo sapiens sapiens. Humans are guided in their interactions with each other and with their physical ecosystem by a hierarchy of needs. Across generations of individuals, these needs manifest within the mind based on sensory input processing driven by brain structure and memory mechanisms. The needs hierarchy guides the provisioning of the individual mind from infancy through adulthood. Enabled by physiological and cognitive processes that encompass a combined emotion and cognition based response, these needs evoke appetites that subsequently give rise to motor action stimuli. Within this sub-species, religious systems appear to be consistently recurring examples of the exploitation of these cognitive mechanisms. Religion in general functions through the exploitation of a trust infrastructure grounded in a physiological facility of the human mind that allows for the establishment of an ecstatic altered state of consciousness. This trust facility in turn enables the development and application of effective governance mechanisms expressed through language, which we term theologies (a term that one may consider abusive in the case of non-theistic religions), upon which are established communities of common interest and shared action. This allows the assertion of codes of moral and ethical conduct giving rise to groups whose members interact with some level of efficiency with each other and with other groups. Members of a group are expected to base their participation in interactions on these codes to the extent that adequate infrastructures can establish a personal level of trust sufficient to elicit the appropriate stimulus for the required actions. When the codes are abrogated, trust is affected, yielding consequences with potentially deep rooted impacts on the various levels of the hierarchy of a person’s individual needs.

As with biological systems operating purely in the physical ecosystem, social ecosystems encompass a variety of threats to the resident species as well as to the contained social orders. With respect to religion, certainly there are charlatans, predators even, that have learned all too well the nuances of religions; of religious practice and religious mechanisms. Some would argue

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