In this chapter some of the lessons learned from studying cells and cellular cancers are used to explore situations that people have created for themselves. The first two sections clarify those general lessons and make the transition from the microcosm of cells and tissues to the macrocosm of people and societies, and then three case studies of macrocosmic malignancy are examined: the Nazis, the classic Maya civilization and the Newfoundland cod fishery.

Section 1 - Essential Cancer

This section recaps the examination of cells and cancers from the general perspective of cellular evolution, which has two fundamental and distinct aspects: the evolution of cells as the components of complex organisms like us, and the evolution of cells as organisms. Cancer cells can be thought of making the transition from one mode of evolution to the other, and once we understand how and why they do that we have a handle on the transition that some ancient cells made in the opposite direction as they became the constituents of multicellular creatures. That leads to a general consideration of how organism complexity may be associated with the risk of acquiring cellular cancers, which sets the stage for a search for their macrocosmic equivalents.

Section 2 - The Search for Macrocosmic Cancers

This section begins by considering what kinds of living organizations might be candidates for developing cancers. Aside from multicellular organisms, the most likely candidates are societies - not those where protections against instability and cancers have been built in over countless generations of natural selection (e.g. insect societies), but in societies that have emerged recently and rapidly without the benefit of such controls: human civilizations. The basics of the rise of large social organizations are covered in order to set the stage for an examination of some obvious and extreme examples of malignancy associated with them.

Section 3 - The Rise and Fall of a Social Malignancy

This section examines the Nazi movement as an example of a social malignancy which originates as a small group spawned in desperate times that gradually gains influence via the development of a radical world view and ultimately manages to convert an entire society into an entity that has many similarities to a tumour or cancer cell, including the fact that it had to be destroyed to eliminate the malignant threat it posed to its surroundings. The aim of pursuing these parallels is to supplement historical and moralistic analyses of the Nazi episode with a biological perspective that has the potential to help us understand how and why such things happen. For instance we can say that the Nazis behaved the way they did because they were evil and/or insane, but we can also see that like cancer cells they were following the social and psychological evolutionary paths of least resistance, and their progress was determined by internal factors and by circumstance. The idea is not to exonerate or condemn, but rather to try and understand the Nazi episode from an evolutionary perspective, which naturally leads to the question of how such developments became possible in the first place.

Section 2 - Malignancy and the Maya

This section examines the gradual rise and catastrophic decline of the classic Maya civilization, which developed in the Yucatan region in relative isolation from other civilizations. The evolution of the Maya is traced back to the emergence of the first agrarian populations in the region, some of which rapidly proceeded to the civilized stage and subsequent collapse while others required many generations to reach the point where a network of sizeable settlements began to emerge throughout the Peten forest region. The pace of development of those settlements picked up considerably as they became partners in extensive networks based upon trade and political alliances, and several rapidly became major city-states which ranked among the largest urban centres of their time. Then in the latter part of the 8th century dramatic changes began to unfold within the network of Maya city-states as ritual warfare gave way to genocide, agricultural systems began to fail, populations began to starve and city after city was sacked and/or abandoned. By the year 900 most of the people remaining in the area were living in small settlements and nomadic communities, much as their ancestors had done two thousand years earlier.

Like the Nazis, the Maya have garnered their share of interest from historians and others who have endeavoured to unravel the mystery of the collapse of their civilization. Here that collapse is considered from a biological perspective with help from what we have learned about cancers and malignancies. The main focus is upon social and natural relationships, both of which appear to have changed significantly as Maya civilization evolved, often with malignant consequences. For example despite their social sophistication many communities depended upon slash-and-burn agriculture, and as their populations expanded it not only became a major challenge for production to keep pace, the increasing disruption and overstressing of local environments triggered dramatic declines in crop yields. On the social side of things the relationships among the Maya elites and between them and their societies also appear to have become increasingly dysfunctional, disruptive and destructive as time went on; for example wars became increasingly common and devastating.

With the overall picture established, some general lessons are derived from the evolution of the Maya civilization and some basic questions are considered concerning why things turned out as they did. This leads to the introduction of the concept of ecomalignancy, which is associated with the evolution of relationships between people and their natural surroundings in ways that have malignant consequences for all concerned; for example the collapse of the Maya city-states also entailed substantial damage to the Peten tropical forest. The concept of ecomalignancy is in turn connected to a new definition of ecosystems as ecological situations that people create for themselves; for example a Maya city-state with its surrounding agricultural regions constitutes an ecosystem. This may seem a pedantic thing to do in light of the earlier rejection of the standard concept of the ecosystem, but it sets up an important evolutionary point, which is that like human societies, human ecosystems are recent evolutionary developments which we have no a priori reason to expect to be inherently stable or capable of maintaining productive relationships with their surroundings. Indeed the historical pattern presented by the Maya and other ancient civilizations suggests that societies and ecosystems have strong inherent tendencies towards malignancy and self-destruction.

Section 5 - The Newfoundland Nightmare

This section examines a recent example of malignancy: the catastrophic collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, which resulted in the extinction of one of the world's most productive marine communities and the decimation of communities throughout the maritime region. Here again the idea is to look at things from a biological perspective with an eye to understanding what happened, and while the story is rather involved it does feature three major themes:

1) Technology - a host of advances allowed fishermen on the Grand Banks to become increasingly efficient predators and disrupters of natural communities and environments.

2) Politics - the policies and decisions of a succession of national, provincial and local governments encouraged the Newfoundland fishery to become increasingly destructive as time went on.

3) Awareness - an ongoing question concerns how aware the people involved were of what was going on in the fishery and what difference that awareness made to their behaviour.

These themes run throughout a fairly extensive examination of what happened when and who did what, and on the surface the story that emerges is consistent with the claim by the minister who presided over the fishery's dying days that there was a little blood on everyone's hands. This does not necessarily mean that the collapse of the fishery was a crime in the classical sense of an act committed with criminal intent, although that remains a possibility. From a biological perspective, however, it can also be cast as a spontaneous conspiracy prosecuted by people who were simply carrying on with business as usual as they saw it; for instance it made sense for fisherman to do whatever it took to stay competitive, for investors to buy the most up-to-date ships and have them out dragging the biggest possible nets day in and day out, for civil servants to tell their political bosses what they wanted to hear and for politicians to keep the voters happy with handouts and generous catch quotas. If most of the people involved with the Newfoundland cod fishery were simply struggling for survival and competing for success on their own immediate terms, then the ultimate factor responsible for the malignant evolution of the fishery was natural selection, as it operates within the modern civilized world.

That observation leads to the question of whether all relationships between people and marine communities are destined to become malignant, which prompts the consideration of a counter-example where people seem to have gotten things right. That example is provided by the Icelandic cod fishery, which was pulled back from the brink of extinction in the early 1990's and set on a sustainable course with the co-operation of everyone involved. A comparison of the Newfoundland and Icelandic fisheries reveals factors that may have been relevant to the different directions taken in their evolution. For example Iceland is an independent nation that is heavily dependent upon the fishery for economic survival, while Newfoundland is a province within a nation where the cod fishery represented little more than an expensive welfare operation.

As for the larger question of where the relationships of modern people and their natural surroundings are headed, a survey of what is going on in fisheries around the world supports the notion that the Icelandic fishery is an exception rather than the rule, since most seem to be following the Newfoundland scenario. This observation indicates that what happened in Newfoundland may be linked to a phenomenon that is much greater in both geographical and historical terms, such as the emergence of a civilized world whose constituents are inherently malignant towards each other and their natural surroundings. Of course if that were so we would not have expected civilized people to have spread so far or done so well up to now, or would we?