ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, individual and cultural inventions that aided in human survival actually have, in many cases, increased our distance to our ecological environs. Combined with the support of powerful democratically based civil society organizations, all are needed to ensure the appropriate balance between human interests and the interests of other living entities on the planet. Simply stated, the ecological challenges facing modern-day individuals and corporations were not experienced by our hominid ancestors. Human societies were much smaller then, and their ecological impacts were limited, even when they shifted from roving nomadic tribes to more settled agricultural villages. The algorithms and neural modules in our modern brains have the same form to satisfy functional challenges facing our ancestors at that time. The “rules” may have become socially constructed and have taken the form of various symbols to communicate the intended norms, but the underlying motivation to live in a community exists independently of its cultural manifestation and indeed has evolutionary value.
