their respective mechanisms of procreation. Of course, adaptation to the environment is a trait that evolution preferentially selected for over the long history of the human species. It is a trait that benefits the human species relative to other species existent within the same environment. At some point in their existence, people began to make clothing to protect them from the weather. They made shelters to allow them to accommodate great climatic variations and they made tools through which they could extend their impact on their environment, including on other species. In a similar fashion, humans would appear to have superior facilities to effect interactions with other species. That is not to ignore the fact that sometimes the shark wins, but in the preponderance of interactions with other species, humans can pretty well stack the deck in their favor. At the present time, the greatest threat to humans from other living species probably derives from the microscopic varieties: microbes and viruses. Why is this? Perhaps, it is because these organisms operate at the very boundaries of our cognitive understanding. They constitute an extremely asymmetric threat environment (more about such asymmetries a bit later). Consequently, in a conflict we may find ourselves much in the same situation as the Incas at the arrival of the Spanish; our social order may simply not be capable of dealing with this particular threat.

In the simplest environment, individual organisms attempt to exist within the world solely through their own actions and interactions with the environment or with other organisms. Each organism must find or produce its own food from which it derives energy to search for, consume or produce more food, and to replicate itself. The better able an organism is to achieve the goals of finding sustenance and of fending off threats, perhaps threats of it becoming food itself, then the more likely it is to have the opportunity to replicate or reproduce additional organisms of a like kind. Consequently, one way to perceive the principle of natural selection is to couch it in terms of an ability to ameliorate threats. For the purpose of this book, we will define individual natural selection as:

For individuals under threat, transmissible individual traits that minimize that threat preferentially propagate relative to traits that don’t.

To illustrate this principle, let’s perform a simple thought experiment. Consider a group of red and yellow fish subject to the threat of a special cat that likes to eat primarily yellow fish (our cat is special in that it is definitely not color blind). If a population of fish, equally distributed between red and yellow color, are subject to this cat, then the yellow fish will be preferentially eaten. Note that the cat doesn’t necessarily eat only yellow fish. It might consume a red fish every once in a while; hence, the statistical nature of the selection process. Over time, however, it is expected that more yellow fish be eaten than are red fish. One can then reasonably infer from this that red fish have a longer average life span than yellow fish, and hence have a greater opportunity to produce offspring. If red fish begat red fish, and yellow fish begat yellow fish, then, if the cat eats enough fish, over time the yellow fish will be no more.

The more likely scenario is not, however, that red fish begat red fish and yellow fish begat yellow fish. Rather, we might expect that the genetic variability of the fish species allows for both red and yellow colored fish. And, an even more likely situation is one in which the colors of the parents influence the distribution of colors among the offspring; for example, the case of a red mother fish and red father fish produces a distribution of baby fish that are preferentially red. The case of a yellow mother fish and a yellow father fish in a similar fashion produces a distribution of baby fish that are preferentially yellow. If the mother fish and the father fish are of different colors then the distribution of offspring might be equally weighted between red and yellow baby fish. We can see that in this modification of the scenario, the fact that the cat still prefers yellow fish says that over time we will see the color red predominate. If the balance of the environment is such that the

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