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Knol

In a physical ecosystem, interactions are essentially infinite in extent. Of course, virtually all interactions have an interval within which the most probable outcome of the interaction becomes known. So, the physical world works through the results of interactions. Human groups form an evolutionary mechanism through their activities and interactions in order to achieve beneficial results with respect to multi-level selection within the physical ecosystems in which the groups exist and operate. The way this should be modeled is debated, with various positions illustrated for example by Scott Atran in In Gods We Trust on one hand and David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral. In one version, it is the groups themselves that compete on a plane comparable to the known individual selection mechanisms that function for all species. The counter argument is not that groups don’t exist and have a significant impact on the evolution of the species, but rather that the effects of group activities impact the ecosystems in which individuals exist and that all natural selection is purely dependent on the mechanisms available to the individual. From our perspective, the salient point is that groups do exist and they exert considerable influence on the behavior of their members. As we discussed earlier, the mechanisms that various groups use to establish consistent codes of conduct have evolved in concert with the biological evolution of the species.

It is not our objective in considering a model for social ecosystems to make value judgments regarding the efficacy of particular social structures. Our perception is that such structures are evaluated through the principles of natural selection. That said, it does seem clear within this model that a central point of differentiation among social systems is the manner in which the rules or statements of policy are determined within any particular policy infrastructure. We have used as a representative example of such an infrastructure the system of government that has been established by the United States Constitution. Certainly, other governmental systems can be similarly characterized within the simple constraints of this model. In the following sections we will consider the relationships of religious systems and secular governments. It might be tempting to try to extract subjective value judgments from the considerations; again, it is not our objective to do so. That said, let us look at just a bit more detail in the makeup of the purveyors of policy within various social ecosystems.

The central feature of a policy infrastructure is a compendium of rules that govern interactions within the infrastructure. These rules can derive from a number of sources, each of which typically characterizes a particular type of policy infrastructure. Depending upon the specific infrastructure, we tend to identify these compendia through a variety of names. Most common to us are the laws formulated by various government bodies. The purveyors of the rules in such systems are typically a legislative body of some type. Within the United States, at the state and national levels, the establishment of laws requires concurrence of an executive function: a governor or the president. The fitness of law at all levels is subject to the scrutiny of a judiciary, the arbiters of policy, who interpret the validity of the rules versus the defining dogma of the relevant policy infrastructure.

A computer policy infrastructure concerns itself with the mechanisms of interactions that can be fully characterized through the concepts of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model presented in Chapter 3. At the base of the stacked protocols described by the model are the physical interconnections over which or through which interactions occur. A common feature of such mechanisms is networks, general connections among common elements across which one can make an arbitrary association of any two such elements. More generally, roads and highways exist as networks, as do railways. By virtue of our metaphorical connection, one might view the DNA molecule as a network. Indeed, we refer to the social substrate as a fabric, an extremely dense network structure. The most common image of networks, at least in current society, is that

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