This chapter explores some of the observations and questions that were raised in the preceding chapter concerning the malignant tendencies in human social and ecological relationships. The story begins with a brief survey of human evolution and then moves on to consider the rise of the civilized world, with particular attention being paid to developments that may have contributed to the emergence of our malignant tendencies.

Section 1 - Adaptation to Adaptability

This section begins with a consideration of the unique qualities that distinguish Homo sapiens from other creatures, qualities which as that name suggests are largely associated with intellectual attributes. For instance we have the largest brains and the most extensive and variable cultures of any primate, and these attributes appear to have given us some significant advantages in the struggle for survival and success - at least when success is measured in terms of total population size, global dispersal and influence over our surroundings. Thus the logical place to begin our survey of human evolution is with the ancestors who show the earliest glimmerings of our unique and critical attributes: the founders of the Homo lineage.

The emergence of early hominines is discussed in light of current evidence which indicates that an assortment of populations and lineages lived in Africa over 2 million years ago. Most of those hominines were capable of making and using simple tools and they seem to have explored a variety of lifestyles; for instance some hunted small animals and/or scavenged meat from larger ones, including those killed by other predators. The possibility is suggested that such lifestyle habits may have contributed to the emergence of a selective synergy where the meat-obtaining skills of the largest, smartest and best-organized hominines allowed and/or encouraged them to become bigger, smarter and better-organized so that they could get even more meat, with the net result being that some hominines were encouraged to proceed rapidly in an evolutionary direction that led towards large-brained, carnivorous, technologically adept and socially sophisticated varieties. Those varieties included Homo habilis and Homo erectus, who were not only successful within the traditional African heartland they also substantially extended the boundaries of the ancient hominine world via a series of migrations that began around two million years ago.

The emergence of a large and complex hominine world introduced many challenges, opportunities and complications for its inhabitants, and it has been an enormous challenge for researchers to reconstruct what was going on with regards to their evolution. Some of the more significant observations are discussed, such as the amazing hominine brain expansion, and various evolutionary scenarios are considered such as the "out of Africa hypothesis," but rather than get bogged down in contentions and specifics, the general evolutionary point is made that the inhabitants of the ancient hominine faced substantial and variable challenges in the struggle to survive and succeed. Some populations may have settled into situations where they were able to fine-tune their adaptive strategies for tens or hundreds of millennia, while others may have faced such intense competition and changeable circumstances that they were under constant pressure to rapidly and radically change their adaptive approach. Some populations and lineages that started out as close relatives may have diverged while long-separated kin may have occasionally rediscovered each other, and from time to time distinctive new varieties and combinations of bodies, behaviours and habits may have appeared and flourished while more ancient forms faded from view due to misfortune or an inability to keep up with changing times. And somewhere within the dynamic matrix of populations, lineages, environments, technologies, cultures, lifestyles, struggles and competitions that made up the ancient hominine world, a combination eventually emerged that allowed its possessors to explore such a wide range of situations so rapidly and effectively that the whole world became theirs for the taking, and they then went on to vastly extend the boundaries of a new human world.

Those master adapter-competitors were the nomadic ancestors of people like us, the modern humans, who were strikingly different from their ancestors and relatives. The moderns had new, powerful and flexible technologies, new approaches to obtaining the necessities of life and an unrivalled ability for learning how to find those necessities in an unprecedented range of natural situations. They also seem to have lived in an intellectual world of their own; for instance when they were not improving existing technologies and inventing new ones the Cro-Magnon people busied themselves by shaping animal and human figures from clay, wood and bone and crafting whistles, flutes and necklaces made of beads painstakingly crafted by the thousands, which were sometimes interred with corpses along with pigments that were likely used as body paint.

The modern human interests in art, music, ornamentation and rituals were as unprecedented as their technological and adaptive skills, and all of these attributes appear so suddenly in the archaeological record that it is virtually impossible to retrace their development or determine their interconnections. This has of course not stopped people from trying to figure out what was going on; for instance some have linked the emergence of modern humans to the development of speech, which would have dramatically increased the potential for the acquisition, processing, sharing and perpetuation of information via individual and collective memory (i.e. culture). Another possibility is that there was a more gradual and general increase in information-handling ability involving several modes of communication such as speech, music, dances, re-enactments, drawings, symbols and rituals, which ultimately contributed to the emergence of intellects that were far more powerful and flexible than those of other humans - not necessarily at the level of individuals, but within the context of social groups. For example on a one-on-one basis Neanderthals may have been just as smart or smarter than Cro-Magnons, but the ability of the latter to think collectively gave them enormous adaptive and competitive advantages (some of the possible trends in the evolution of human intellects are discussed in terms of the evolution of their closest artificial equivalent, the computer).

Regardless of how they came by their impressive adaptive and intellectual abilities, those abilities were clearly important to the success of our nomadic ancestors as they swept through the ancient hominine world in a matter of millennia and then spread out into vast new territories such as the Americas. That great wave of migration set the stage for further dramatic evolutionary developments.

Section 2 - Integration to Conversion

This section deals with happened as our nomadic ancestors learned how to live in such a wide range of landscapes and natural situations that their successes ensured that their world became an increasingly crowded and competitive place. The basic facts of nomadic life are considered from the ecological, social and intellectual perspectives via some simple hypothetical examples, as is the transition from nomadic lifestyles based upon integrating into natural communities and landscapes to lifestyles based upon the creation of human-dominated situations, or ecoconversion. The consequences of ecoconversion are considered via examples which point to the possibility that in some circumstances the transition to ecoconversion would have allowed for the emergence of human populations that were considerably larger and denser than those of nomads. As such populations began to emerge, some appear to have latched onto a self accelerating "magic cycle" of expansion and self-organization that drove the rapid emergence of large and complex social organizations: societies and civilizations.

The development of early civilizations is considered from the perspective of the challenges they faced in establishing and maintaining productive social and ecological relationships and dealing with competitors, and specific historical examples are used to illustrate how those challenges changed as societies expanded, proliferated and interacted with each other within the context of a rapidly-developing civilized world. The development that world is considered from a historical perspective which emphasizes the extreme rapidity of its emergence and evolution, and from a biological perspective which supports the proposition that the closest natural equivalents to human societies are cellular cancers. For instance both societies and cancers are naturally inclined towards rapid proliferation, dispersal and change, and their evolution typically involves adapting to new situations, creating new kinds of organizations, accessing new resources and suppressing or attacking competitors. The parallels also extend to the eventual fates of cancers and societies, which typically involve one or more of: 1) arrested growth due to an inability to overcome natural limitations of resources or living space, 2) stagnation due to a lack of appropriate adaptations and innovations (e.g. critical inventions or mutations), 3) failures in the face of external challenges (e.g. disasters, attacks) and internal instabilities, and 4) catastrophic failure brought about by the deleterious effects of cancers and societies upon their surroundings.

There are of course some key differences between cancers and civilizations. For instance people are capable of adapting, sharing information and organizing themselves in ways that cells cannot, and no matter what disasters societies encounter there is always a chance that something of them will survive in the form of remnants (e.g. refugees, relics memories, traditions) and replicas (e.g. colonies). This means that while the evolution of individual societies like the classic Maya city-states can be understood in terms of the development of cancers within natural host systems, it is also useful to think of the evolution of civilizations and the civilized world in terms of the development of networks of highly robust cancers inhabiting the living world at large. It is also important to recognize that in addition to creating new opportunities and challenges for their constituent individuals, groups, populations, communities and cultures, the emergence of large complex social organizations also created potent new contexts for the evolution of their constituents. It follows that the emergence of the civilized world had profound consequences for the evolution of everything within it.

Section 3 - Domination and Dissociation

This section covers the development of the civilized world, which right from the beginning was a large and complex place. The examination concentrates upon two basic themes: 1) influences and developments that may have led and/or encouraged civilized people to become malignant towards each other and their natural surroundings; and 2) influences and developments that might have restrained such tendencies but failed to emerge or were discouraged. The latter point relates to the biological observation that human societies do not possess the innate checks and balances that allow insect societies to maintain stable social and ecological relationships, and to the historical observation that communities, people and societies that have managed to establish and maintain stable relationships for lengthy periods of time have in many cases eventually been overrun, co-opted or converted by more aggressive and less socially and ecologically responsible competitors. For example ancient Egypt was successful within its natural context for several millennia and within its social neighbourhood for several centuries, but it eventually faltered as a competitor within the increasingly intense crucible of Mediterranean civilization.

These themes are developed by considering the evolution of societies and the civilized world from a variety of perspectives, with the main emphases being upon organization, ecology, economics, competition, cultures, intellects and contexts of existence and evolution - many if not most of which changed substantially as the civilized world developed. For example competitions for traditional desirables like living space, essential resources and social status expanded to include things like wealth and political influence (within and among societies), while on more abstract levels competitions developed among attitudes, beliefs, religions and philosophies. The multiplication, expansion and intensification of competitions and interactions within the civilized world had many consequences, some of which contributed to fundamental changes in the way people thought about and dealt with each other and their surroundings. Some of the more significant changes were associated with the development of new intellectual tools, with one of the earliest and most significant being literacy.

The development of literacy is briefly retraced within the context of societies where the emergence of writing systems allowed a wide range of information to be recorded, including verbal knowledge traditions. For example physicians started writing down descriptions of diseases and treatments and comparing notes, while legends and poems became documents that served as the forerunners of philosophical speculations, memoirs, eyewitness accounts and histories. The development of literary traditions allowed people to share and accumulate knowledge on a variety of subjects within and across generations and develop new ideas, perspectives and intellectual tools, including a set of methods that was to have some profound consequences for the evolution of the civilized world: rationalism.

The development of rationalism is briefly retraced within the context of Greek and Hellenic civilization, with emphasis upon rational attitudes and methods and upon the impacts that both had upon how people thought and behaved. For instance as rational approaches became increasingly popular among Greek intellectual elites they began to challenge established beliefs and traditions as they compared different ways of acting, thinking and exploring, developed new exploratory approaches and built upon knowledge that was accumulated and refined over generations of talking, writing and experimenting. Many of the patterns of thought and behaviour that emerged among those people were to become prominent within their world and within the Western civilization it gave rise to. For example in Archimedes we find the archetype of the Renaissance man, who is comfortable with the most abstract intellectual pursuits and willing to direct his curiosity and energy towards the solution of practical problems, such as assaying a crown or repelling Roman invaders.

By the time of Archimedes, Western civilization had already provided ample proof of its potential for generating rapid and radical changes in aspects of life ranging from basic ecology to esoteric intellectual inquiry, and it is also evident that those changes were being driven and shaped by forces that were peculiar to civilized humankind and its unique preoccupations with things like power, wealth, fame, truth and novelty. For instance the attack on Syracuse was part of a larger clash between the empires of Rome and Carthage, a clash which became so intense that the eventual winners were satisfied with nothing less than wiping their competitors from the face of the Earth. That was a harbinger of things to come, and it can be argued that most of the elements of the world we live in today were in place by the time of Archimedes - indeed if Syracuse had not been overrun he may have sparked an industrial revolution two thousand years before the one that finally developed in Europe. This proposition provides the basis for the final stage of our evolutionary survey, which examines the rise of the modern civilized world as a social, ecological and intellectual entity from a rather unusual perspective.

Section 4 - Life Above the Clouds

This section briefly examines the emergence of the modern civilized world by focussing on its main developmental themes: detachment, desire and displacement. These elements were already present in the ancient civilized world and they persisted with local ebbs and flows for centuries, and then the dawning of the second millennium brought a series of events - ranging from the rediscovery of the knowledge of the ancient Greeks to a favourable shift in the weather and a regional population boom - which culminated in a dramatic increase in the rate, scope and range of developments. Most significantly, explorers, mercenaries, colonists, entrepreneurs and conquerors began to leave Europe in a globe-spanning search for fame, fortunes and new opportunities. Some succeeded and many perished, but collectively those pioneers and adventurers carried along an irresistible wave that drove the greatest and most rapid dispersals, displacements, disruptions and destructions of human populations and communities in history. That wave was both massively destructive and vigorously creative; for instance in some places enormous new societies and civilizations emerged in a matter of generations via emigration, population expansion and the co-opting of indigenous peoples. Those new societies and many older ones continued to undergo substantial expansions, displacements and dispersals as the centuries passed, and they experienced other rapid and radical changes which contributed to the emergence of a modern civilized world that is immensely powerful and largely populated by people and communities that have had little opportunity, incentive or desire to form deep, lasting or even conscious connections with their natural or social surroundings. In other words civilized humankind has made itself a world where malignancy comes naturally.