Biological systems develop and evolve to their most stable configuration for a given set of environmental conditions. Man's information and technology changes, his concept of himself and his environment changes, and he may even change his immediate environment to suit himself, but man's biology does not change, at least not very rapidly. He still needs 200-300 calories daily food intake balanced with appropriate minerals and vitamins, and although he may live on less or more, his diet remains within narrow confines or he does not survive. (The function of vitamin C may have been discovered in the 20th century but man's need for it is as old as the species.)

The consequence of biological development for man has been to limit his biochemistry to a predictable course, to limit his physical development to within a close range, and to define his repertory of behavioral responses to within a finite limit. Imprinting, sexual identification, and socialization operate in man with all the vigor and resoluteness found in "less intelligent" species, with the added complication of spoken-written language and its subsequent toolmaking explosion. One need not invent mathematics or the computer to throw a rock at a telephone pole, even though this is a complicated ballistics problem, but mathematics is essential to fire-control radar gunnery. Radar-controlled gunnery is no more wonderful than throwing a rock, but its principles relate to speech-language-toolmaking rather than to the innate biology of the rock thrower. And more importantly, the rock thrower has not changed a whit simply because he can use radar-controlled gunnery.

Having defined toolmaking as progress, man has led himself to believe that since his tools have changed dramatically over the last few decades he must have changed also. In mid-20th century, man is more concerned with the environment for his tools than for himself. Where to park the car? How high should a skyscraper be? Where to land the jumbo jets? In some advanced technologies, man has adapted his entire life style to one transportation tool, as with the automobile in Los Angeles; or to one monotonously replicated housing tool, as with four-bedroom houses in suburbia.

Along with his deeper understanding of the physical universe and his increased ability to control or mediate its activity, man also increased his potential for colossal blundering. In essence, he has transferred his biological behavior mode, with its limited potential for mischief when used individually, to his ability for mass communication and mass destruction. The horror of modern warfare is not couched in man's capacity to destroy as an individual, but relates to his ability to command the enormous forces available to him through technology.

But technology has not changed the properties of man the biological organism. Average life expectancy has increased in recent decades, but absolute longevity has remained about the same in historical memory. Body size has changed with better nutrition, but the changes seem to be quantitative rather than qualitative. The essentials of good diet were not discovered in an ancient Sumarian home economics book; they were found in the abundance of edible commodities, animal and plant, in man's environment. Our present-day science of nutrition is based upon information after the fact of survival as biological organisms, not before the fact of science, technology, and planning. No amount of toolmaking will transform man into anything other than a social organism. A smart one to be sure, perhaps the smartest, but, nevertheless, a biological organism who does things because "he wants to" or because it makes him feel good—"it" and "good" remaining undefined. Man exercises intuition as well as reason, and had a holistic view of his environment before the notion of language arose evolutionally. For better or worse, this is the man, with his linear, reasoned, logical information and his technological artifacts, but with his holistic sensory and memory apparatus, who is settled over most of the globe today.

Cybernetics as a logical tool was invented in an attempt to place machines in some analytical framework. No machine yet invented by man has evolved beyond simple idiocy and so it is somewhat surprising that cybernetics, in its most general and useful application, requires a greater understanding of mathematics than the average individual can bring to the problem. The supreme paradox of speech-language as a tool is that man can feel and subsequently act upon the knowledge of cybernetics as it applies to himself and his environment, although he may have great difficulty in comprehending the symbolic representations of the same information in mathematics. Similarly, man may feel good or bad, elated or sad without knowing a particle of biochemistry. As a biological organism, man reacts to his environment. His environment includes other men, plants, and other animals in the totality of physical, chemical, and biological factors. Before he could describe it cybernetically as a system, man's reaction to this environment was simple and direct and remains so; he adjusts to his environment or he does not survive. He may have been killed, poisoned, eaten alive, or burned, but time was on the side of the species and a behavior pattern evolved which was a process of sorting out successful patterns for survival.

The clue to understanding how man lives in communities lies in the fact that man evolved living in communities millennia before his capacity to understand the cybernetics of self-regenerating, self-regulating biological systems. Man evolved in communities and undoubtedly they have exercised a selecting influence upon him. Organisms living together in communities are the norm not the exception, and may occur in the plant and animal kingdoms at all levels of biological development, from the very simple to the most complex. Biological communities vary considerably depending upon the particular environment in which they are formed and the types and kinds of plants and/or animals that populate them. The simplest distinguishing features of communities are whether they are sedentary or mobile, whether composed of one or more species, the stability of the species mixture, and the longevity of the group that forms the community. Many communities are short-lived and are soon overwhelmed by longer living, more versatile species or groups. For example, pioneer plant communities of an abandoned field are unstable and change rapidly and other communities are destroyed by predators (e.g., coral reefs when attacked by crown-of-thorns starfish). Many communities are disturbed by physical forces that erupt regularly or periodically such as fires or wars that have destroyed cities (e.g., Cologne, London, Chicago) and by natural disasters such as hurricanes that have leveled New England coniferous forests. Many communities change because the physical conditions in which they exist change, and even slight changes can have a profound effect over a long period of time. Mobile communities are less affected by minute changes in the physical or chemical elements of their environment. The wandering caribou herds of the Far North, the wandering bison herds of the Great Plains of North America, schools of herring, cod, anchovies, whales, and the animals, including man, that prey upon them are insulated from these minor environmental shocks because they can evade them. The major environmental changes that allegedly accounted for demise of the dinosaurs are the exception, for apparently there was no escape. The phenomenon of migration may be related to the notion of escape from environmental stress, although in the long interim in which the physiological techniques of migration have evolved it does not seem necessary to postulate conditions other than those inherent in the animals migrating. Plant migration, however, involves the life and death of the dispersing species and is not explained so easily on a behavioral basis but must depend upon a great deal of chance. It is a measure of the extreme prolificacy of plants that they are found everywhere they will grow.

From this we can see that environmental pressures have played an important role in the adaptation to community formation among biological organisms. Organisms that can endure and even flourish in a given environmental circumstance tend to remain in that situation; those that cannot, either migrate or perish.

The earliest form of man's biological community apparently was an adaptation to the predator-prey relationship. While certain vestigial organs such as the appendix indicate that man was capable of an herbivorous existence and still is with the proper choice of herbs, the record suggests that early man was primarily a hunter. However, this interpretation may have developed because the fossil and artifact record is easier to preserve and interpret than plant remains which often rot or grow into a new plant and are lost either way.

Most animals known, even social animals such as baboons or gorillas or elk, form mobile biological communities. They form associations that may be very complicated socially but their behavioral response to the environment evokes only the most passive attempts to modify the environment to insure their well-being and survival. In much the same way, man roamed the earth as a hunter, with a territory probably not much larger than that of a lion. When he built his first hunting camp he made a remarkable switch by adjusting his environmental circumstances to a stationary configuration based on a variety of functions other than food-producing or gathering. Man did not become sedentary in order to feed, grow, reproduce, and die in one spot like a coral or a sea lily. Men joined together for the many reasons associated with the creation of wealth.