This presents a hypothesis, although paradigm may be a more appropriate term, within which many otherwise puzzling phenomena, especially those which manifest with increasing ecological mixing, may be more tractably modeled. It has particular relevance to human ecology and its relationship to trade, transport and sociopolitical dynamics that reach back to the dawn of civilization and are ever more relevant with increasing globalism.

I wrote this hypothesis after returning in June of 2000 from a month long trip to Zimbabwe (where particularly interesting dynamics were at play between European and African ecologies), while contemplating Africa's relationship to the rest of the world, particularly considering human ecology, but also considering coevolved organisms. It has a lot of disturbing implications, and has a good deal of evidence backing it up that becomes fairly obvious once one adopts its viewpoint. In that sense it, like Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype", may be more of a paradigm than a mere hypothesis.

I had not read any of Dawkins' work for 6 years, but since I referenced his book, I decided to revisit it. He comes very close to stating a key aspect of this hypothesis in the last sentence of the second paragraph of chapter 12 (Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes) of his book "The Extended Phenotype". I thought this hypothesis was so far fetched that only someone who shared my intuitive slant could grasp it, so it caught me quite by surprise that he had come so close to stating a key aspect of what I state below. Of course, it may very well be the case that this sentence had, during my prior reading, more of an impact on my thinking than I recognized.

What Dawkins lacked in The Extended Phenotype was the connection between the evolution of extended genetic dominance and evolutionarily stable states in ecosystems driven by extended phenotypics -- something I call "ecological annealing."

A mnemonic device you, as a fellow primate, may find useful while reading this article is to think of the vernacular meaning of the word "god" in the image of the ultimate polygynous alpha male. This alpha male, by his sheer commanding presence (involving emission of pheromones as well as a variety of secondary sexual characteristics) rules over his primate troop at the heart of his species' ecological range.