might call this a ping. Its purpose is to periodically confirm that the lines of communication are still open. The second (“Let this cup pass from me”) is very definitely a petitioner’s request. The request (consideration sought) is specific while the exchange offer (consideration offered) is vague, but open-ended. It is clear, however, that the goal of the transaction is consideration requested for consideration offered. So, we can discern from each a well defined framework for a transaction. It is clear who the parties to the transaction are, what the subject of concern is, the desired outcome, the consideration due to the various parties, and the implied consequences of honorably, or even dishonorably, concluding the transaction.

A familiar homily suggests that “There are no atheists in fox-holes.” When external stimuli are applied at the level of our most basic needs, at the level of safety or physiological requirements, we are apt to address ourselves to the highest trust authority of our primordial social ecosystem. A rather cold, calculating way to say it is that when we’re scared out of our wits, we turn for protection to the god that we might well have ignored up to now. It is at such a time that we tend to recognize the source of last resort to our most desperate need of safety and protection, or more appropriately, of actions of redemption that we urgently require. It is reinforcing here that our prayers are directed at the ultimate trust purveyor in our social ecosystem (say God), not the ultimate policy arbiter (say the Pope).

Remember back in the first chapter, that this was one of the theses posted by Martin Luther. The Pope, who was the ultimate policy arbiter within the policy infrastructure in question, could only deal with supplicants to the point of their death, not beyond. Death forms a hard boundary of the observable physical ecosystem. Prayer, however, is a transaction specifically aimed beyond the boundary of the policy infrastructure. It is a direct appeal to a deity to “please forget about the physical laws.” If it requires repealing the natural force of gravity to keep our plane from crashing, that’s perfectly all right in this instance. Again, our point here is not to delve too deeply into the theological implications of prayer, and certainly not to disparage the earnest pleas for help that we may make when faced with dire situations, or even just the general events of our normal lives for that matter. But, from a social ecosystem perspective, it might be construed as a differentiating factor between the formal definitions of religion based social systems and égalité oriented, secular social systems. However, we also recognize that in reality such interactions do occur within secular systems, we just don’t generally consider their existence in a formal definition of the system. As we’ve seen with our earlier discussion of Roe versus Wade, within the United States legal system, the applicability of law can occur at some post-transaction time, and new law can actually be created, outside the normal policy infrastructure, in the same fashion. We then suggest that religions in general actually provide more elaborate representative illustrations of a realistic model of social ecosystems and we would do well, as part of a scientific discourse on such systems, to seek understanding from these illustrations.

So, concerning members of the human species, can we discern a more formal specification of the mechanism that we recognize as prayer and why it forms a typical interaction method in the most critical of situations? It seems to us that it is the logical outcome of the trust and policy infrastructures that we humans use to establish and operate our grouping mechanisms. In times of ultimate need, when we present the ultimate stimulus for interaction, we seek redress from the highest arbiters of trust in our experience. For those in whom the threshold of religion grounded trust is continuously high, for the true believers, prayer is both a routine mechanism as well as a routinely satisfying one. Whether it’s a function of how one prays, the semantics of the language that is used to pray, the policy that is the subject of prayer, or the potential recourse of prayer, this most intimate of religious activities would seem worthy of study and formalization within the context of interactions among the human species. Prayer brings into play the concepts of ritual and

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