In endowing her creatures with the indomitable genetic will to survive, nature by coincidence also fitted them with a tribal instinct; to make common cause with those like themselves, viewing all others as competitors for resources that made survival possible. Becoming the 'fittest' to survive meant that those who were able to adapt to their environment best, did survive. It's a complex blueprint that nature devised.

Humankind prides itself on the ability to think, to observe and to plan ahead, to respond to challenging situations as befitting intelligent being. But in the same instance has never been able to use intelligence to surmount inherited reaction, primarily the survival instinct, and it is that unbridled, deeply engrained instinct that guides us to suspicion, hatred and violence toward others not of our perceived kind.

They can be distinctly ethnic, culturally variant, historically different or practise another kind of tribalism in religious choice, or ideologically opposed to the kind of politics accepted elsewhere and all become, in the primitive mind that lingers in all of us to whatever degree 'different' and as such a threat to the social mores and political contract we have devised to keep any society at peace.

Reaction to their diversity is usually on a slow simmer in more civilized societies, but it is there. In societies closer to their tribal-clan roots that visceral reaction is more direct and usually more brutal.

One can wonder how a young man privileged to grow to maturity in a pluralist society like Canada, ostensibly accepting of differences and maintaining suspicion at a low ebb, can possibly elevate a perceived threat to the status of 'us or them' to the extent that he will acquire a deadly firearm and use it at a gathering of religious faithful with the intention to kill.

But this is exactly what has occurred in a nation that prides itself on its vaunted inclusiveness and generosity in welcoming others to live among them. A young man with all the privileges of a wealthy society, including the opportunity to have a university education, enrolled in anthropology courses and political science, who could nonetheless harbour a simmering resentment against a religion other than his own, to the extent that he plans and executes mass murder, leaving in the wake of that assault countless wounded, and children who will never grow to maturity alongside a loving father.

It is to weep, and to wonder; whom to cast the blame toward? Imperious, impervious and indifferent nature, the constructor of all that exists, or the inborn characteristics of human nature, confused by the ability to make informed choices through the cerebral cortex or reacting to the influence of nature-endowed instincts so out of time with the destiny we foresee that forever glances back at the primitive creatures we once were, and occasionally revert to.