Introduction
How about tracking the extent to which organisms manage to work on relationships that look inward & outward from the boundaries of skin, family & culture, i.e. in human terms to spend time on self, friends, family, hierarchy, culture & profession? Some organisms, like tulips and gophers, do not naturally focus on all six.
A long-emergent societal goal has been to empower humans for discretionary participation in all of these areas. Consideration of all layers at once suggests that this may incidentally nurture informed activity-layer diversity, since all sorts of specialists and generalists might improve society's chances to successfully adapt. One might even think of this as a strategy to harness the power of our human fallibility to the greater good, esp. of social systems assembled via processes that exceed the capacity of any one individual.
This may sound trivial, until one realizes that policies which focus on a single layer of organization sometimes do great damage to other layers in the process of implementation. Moreover, integrative measures of community-health (like Gallup-Healthways 5) may be key to closed-loop balancing of strategy on important cross-disciplinary issues in the days ahead.
This "broken symmetry based selection beyond the organism" approach, in addition to
(a) formally recognizing the value of more than just dollars and "body count",
might provide insight into:
(b) the role of new media (like radio, and the internet) at enabling rogue idea-pools i.e. ones that attract symbiotes while failing to respect layers of organization in a given community, and
(c) the un-intuitive fact that experts in a field are often the most resistant to paradigm improvements, e.g. given some idea-pools' reliance on organism-centric (e.g. "hero") tales and vague platitudes rather than empirical observations.
The trick, of course, may be to make a genuinely healing case for the opportunity without: (i) becoming a football in a rogue idea-pool's culture war, or at the very least (ii) triggering expert resistance.
For more in the short term as this space gets up and running, check out our web pages (with links to recent papers) on task layer multiplicity, tabulating surprisals, and Bayesian data analysis.
Postscript: We also have technical collaboration space available on campus and invitation-only media-wiki sites. If you are interested in access to the latter, let us know.