WE ARE Dangerous (Another Look...)

My friend Mark Johnston spends a lot of time in the mountains and a lot of time traversing from Y to Z.  Many of these travels are solo.  Many are with his sidekick Archie -  Man's best friend.  Or is he?
 

Mark send this to me a few days ago:

I've continued thinking about your essay I AM Dangerous.  And my first thought was that Archie, the dog, is dangerous, dangerous to himself and those around him. But my following thought was that Archie is not a natural animal per se. We are not blameless in the selective breeding of prey drive so intense that the single minded hunting dogs, from which Archie is derived, will push themselves beyond reason and safety in pursuit. Part of me sees this *manufactured* behavior as aberrant, but I also realize the nut doesn't fall far from the tree in either genetics or culture.

If Archie is dangerous, that is partly our responsibility and reflects our choices.  We may accept his dangerousness as the cost of his proclivity for hunting. We humans, too, are subject to selection because some negligible reproductive advantage in certain behavioral or physical variants is amplified over generations. If I am dangerous, it is probably because being at least somewhat dangerous allowed my forebears to thrive.  And I am the product of millions of successful reproductive events.  What are the odds? 

And why stop at the individual?  We humans often act collectively and our culture seems to embody the latin "audentes fortuna iuvat" -- fortune favors the bold. No one says in which domains this does or doesn't apply.  The assumption is that you pick your domain of interest and knock yourself out by pushing just as far as you can. You may butt up against societal strictures or physical limitations, but humans often embrace this world view.  Furthermore, we have built industrial and military machinery that when put in the service of risk takers has global consequences.  "We ARE Dangerous."