cat can eat fish very slightly faster than they can reproduce, then ultimately the cat will have eaten all the yellow fish and only red fish will remain. It then becomes an interesting question whether the cat can live on an exclusive diet of red fish?

While this thought experiment is extremely simple, it does present a metaphorical description of the situation in which rapid, perhaps instantaneous change occurs within a stable environment. The yellow fish and the red fish might well have existed in their little pool over the course of many generations, stabilizing in a population nearly equally split between the red and the yellow. Now, a perturbation is introduced into the environment; a cat whose taste buds appear directly connected to his eyes wanders by. The ability of the species within the environment to react to this new, until now unknown threat, determines the future course of the species within the pool. If the fish population did not already exhibit the genetic variability to generate progeny of different colors, then none of the fish in the pool would realize any preferential situation, at least related strictly to coloring, relative to the other fish.

Now, however, suppose that a mutation event occurred within the fertilized egg of one of the fish, such that the offspring was colored red. Now, even through there is only one red fish, it has a very slightly enhanced probability that it will live long enough to generate offspring. After all, among all the threats to its existence, which are common with all the other fish in the pool, at least this one fish has a smaller chance of being eaten by the cat than the others. The chance of such a random mutational event occurring is very small; however, the impact can be quite significant.

Of course, the amelioration of threats is usually not simple. As it happens, in some instances if one threat is diminished, its diminution might actually enhance the prospects for a different threat. Let us consider a characteristic of the human species whose impact is less obvious. For example, if a specific person has the characteristic of preferentially storing excess food in the form of body fat, then that particular person might well derive a benefit in an environment where food sources are somewhat unreliable. The ability to store food when it’s available and then use that body fat (in effect, to sacrifice the body fat) to live off of when food becomes scarce has some obvious benefits. Of course, these benefits might be offset by certain liabilities that accrue as well. A layer of body fat might help preserve core body temperature if the environment in which the person lives is a cold climate. On the other hand, this characteristic might present a severe liability in a warm or hot climate. We recognize today that this characteristic, or actually this collection of characteristics, forms the basis for an extremely complex interaction impact analysis. In fact, this example brings to the fore many issues involved in evaluating natural selection processes. This more complex situation is termed multi-level selection.

Stored body fat has the near term effect of staving off starvation when food is not supplied to the body on a timely basis. In the early periods of mankind’s emergence as a species, when pure physical interactions with the surrounding environment were the dominant natural selection processes, having a metabolism that used food energy efficiently was a beneficial trait. However, as the species excelled in its ability to compete with other species and to mitigate the impact of environment, the life span of an average human increased significantly. This has brought into play more complex mechanisms and interactions. For instance, on an anecdotal basis we recognize the liability of excess stored body fat, both physiologically as well as socially. Obesity is a well recognized precursor to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Within social systems, being overweight is a liability in the ascent to the corporate boardroom or in simply getting a date for that matter. Many counter examples suggest this was not always true, showing the impact of changing social standards over relatively short periods of time. So, this particular characteristic becomes one of many whose evolutionary impact might vary significantly depending on the

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