At the cosmic level, evolution is the complexifying process facilitated by intrinsic linking mechanisms. Galaxies and stars and planets spiral thru their life-cycles, disintegrate, and provide the material for further restructuring. At the biological level the process of trialing optimization alternatives and complexifying information storage options becomes increasingly evident. It is the intrinsic chaotic nature of the universe which stimulates, by means of mutations, the modification of evolving forms. Nature, in eating itself, stimulates an internal tension to eat or be eaten, and so progressively favours whatever can evolve intelligent strategies for acquiring more food or avoiding being consumed. A memory structure that triggers an alert at the scent of a predator that ate its progenitor, has at least the potential to react in a manner that might result in interim self- preservation and the opportunity for copulation. Any brain that acquires the capacity to process its stored information will rapidly enhance its survival strategies if it can develop the ability to deceive. Secrecy and deception augment and reinforce the potential for its own survival and sexual propagation.

The often colourful simplifications of myth and religion may be useful as structures for diverse cultural works of art, but credibility is tautened to very high pitches when they are presented as incorporating the complex patternings of evolution. In unravelling the evolutionary record, the influence of such conceptual simplifications as scavenging, parasitism, and predation are clearly significant and yet essentially ignored by traditional accounts. It would seem that as well as the intrinsic capacity of the elements to form complexified entities like the amino acid alanine, mutual benefit associations must have been a significant factor in the development of such structures as cells and lichens.

Humans in particular, have evolved to the stage of being able to classify themselves as the most intelligent food within the biosphere, although they do not usually think of themselves as being part of the food cycle, but rather as supervisors of a food domestication technology. Countless viruses, microbes, protozoa, insects, fish and the occasional crocodilian however, have cause to celebrate the ready availability of this hominid biomass.