I think I get what you're saying now. All life takes from it's environment what it needs. Would you agree with that statement? Essentially, life eats life except plankton.
I'm a bit more general than that. Everything is ultimately a black box to me. A black box is the generic building block for modeling anything systemic. It's just a 'thing' which has a containing boundary which has inputs and outputs through which it interacts with it's environment.
The black box is useful because it's easier to understand systems of cells, organs, people, transistors, computers, groups, factories, nations, etc when you realize that they all have the same basic structure to which the same fundamental principles apply.
Want to kill a cell? Person? Nation?
* compromise it's integrity
* block it's inputs and outputs
So, back to predation. The prey and the predator are linked in more ways than the one-way capture of prey by the predator. They are evolutionary pressures on each other and thus evolve as a self-regulating unit. This is why transplanting a native species from one location to a foreign location (for the species) is an ecological disaster: the native species isn't regulated in the same way it was in the local system where it evolved. The predator finds it's new prey easy because it didn't develop defenses against it like the predators natural prey did during their co-evolution -- so the prey becomes extinct and this leads to wider systemic effects. Also, since the predator's population isn't being checked by a another predator or other environmental factor (cold weather) -- it rampantly breeds and spreads causing more extinctions of species of prey.
Humans have no natural restraints except the lack of claws, teeth, speed, camouflage -- the things which make a predator successful. Instead, humans have adapted and innovated ways to hunt when it so obviously doesn't come as a part of our DNA. My personal view of humans is that we're explorers and innovators. While humans have developed technology which makes it easy to kill for food, and since innovation and adaptation is our survival strategy, we've innovated in a million different ways no natural predator could understand -- all the way to the moon and back. Unfortunately, with nothing to check humans and because they're horrible at self-regulation they've been known to hunt out a species of millions in a few short years.
So, in closing that section, humans aren't predators. Hunting is another adaptation (and or innovation) just like clothing, farming, television, cell phones, etc etc.
"By "nature" I was referring to the wilderness. I realize it's a very general term, and it was meant to be. The predation of the wilderness has its parrallel to predation found in a housing project, the board rooms of fortune 500 companies, a highschool locker room, or a neighborhood play ground. Predatory behavior, in the sense that I mean it, is ubiquitous."
I seem to have missed all the cannibalism that this paragraph predicts throughout all the years I was growing up. I agree that somethings going on there, but I wouldn't call it predation because the predator doesn't eat it's prey. Ah, I found the perfect word. I hope you don't mind but I'm going to quote your last paragraph again but with a slight change :
"By "nature" I was referring to the wilderness. I realize it's a very general term, and it was meant to be. The parasites of the wilderness has its parrallel to parasitic behavior found in a housing project, the board rooms of fortune 500 companies, a highschool locker room, or a neighborhood play ground. Parasitic behavior, in the sense that I mean it, is ubiquitous."
