Nature's blessing and curse is the idea

We so often use the term nature to describe the working of the environment, climate, animal behaviour etc, but we have lost site of the very thing that binds us to all these things and that is, the idea. The idea makes us an integral part of nature. The idea is a universal function that we share with most if not all of the animal kingdom. There are even arguments pointing to the possibility that plants have an ideational attribute to their functioning.

If we look at the honeybee and how the colony builds its hive, we have to conclude that the information required to build the hive is already present in the bees. Darwin suggests that the technique evolved from small and successive modifications of simpler instincts and resulted in the final plan of the hive and the technique to realise such a plan [9] . This does however not explain where the original instinct and idea [10] came from in the first place. Putting aside the actual physical quality of the instinct [11] , and concentrating on the idea behind the instinct we can see that the idea is either communicated between successive generations of bees or it is something innate in each bee and given new impetus in each bee.

The behaviour of the male lion is particularly interesting when looking at ideas. A single male lion will challenge the male leader of an existing pride for the purpose of removing the leader and taking over his role and the female lions in the pride. If this challenge succeeds the new leader will kill the lion cubs from the previous male. To us this sounds abhorrent and against our common sense. In fact it is the simple idea of removing the remnants of the previous male from the pride for a fresh and new start. It also induces the females in the pride to become fertile.

We can see in nature that some ideas are to us [12] positive, and others, negative. It is no different in human nature. The idea has from the dawn of mankind been the way we conduct ourselves in nature and with each other. It is however, human consciousness that enables us to give ethical accounts of the ideas that present themselves to us. We know that to build a structure, a life or a nation is positive for the people doing the building. It is growth and moving forward, it feels good and we flourish when doing so. On the other hand if we have to displace our neighbour to achieve this idea, it becomes negative from our neighbour's point of view. This exemplifies the relativity of the ethics of an idea and that the idea rarely ever consists of purely positive outcomes.

It is clear from the above that the idea operates outside of ethical constraints. It is the human consciousness of outcomes that attaches an ethical value to it. The idea has however, a purpose in nature that has worked since the dawn of time and its goal is always in the future. It is the struggle for survival and the ingenuity of the idea that enables this survival. It is a popular belief to think that human nature can stand outside of this system because we have a level of consciousness and ethical guidelines. This is a naIve belief as the continual struggle between individuals and nations shows.