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Greed needs refrigeration

        An anthropomorphic "Human-like" avaricious gluttonous Greed doesn't work among animals without refrigeration. A Socio-economic "altruism" or another form of Tribalism might allow for Greed, as we find in the Human animal.
        Among "wild-type" natural animals, individuals without social stratification (here we exclude ants & bees & Hyenas, etc.), consider the following:
       
        1. Greedy hoarding individuals would reduce everyone else's resources, and probably the number of (nearby) potential mates, unless tempted by the hoard.
        2. Control of resources beyond the greedy individual's needs requires a cost (energy/time/resource protection/risk of injury) expenditure with little payoff (How much really needed? Why protect what you can't use?)
        3. Greed and horded resources need a defense/protection strategy.
       
        Imagine a food-greedy animal with a perfect den- one way in, rock walls, perhaps a door. Eventually, some insect, mold, or bacteria will attack the store and destroy it. Or another of its greedy species will attempt to conquer the resources through attack, ambush, raid, etc. or with the cooperation of others; then we get back to the "altruism" of fair individual forage?
       
        Animal Behaviorists often neglect to mention Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which I feel may illustrative some unconsidered general principles of artificial selection (by that I suggest mating that depends on choice, instead of chance encounters (not only human intervention, but intra-species choice; i. e. girl's choice)

Greedy Genes

        Greed could be adaptive; so could child abuse, nomadism, cruelty, and general degeneracy, as evinced by the Ik people of Africa (was it Colin Turnbull's book?) who lost their land and humanity through displacement and war, probably due to greed. Putting a daughter in a cage to starve, and then to casually throw her remains over the side of the arroyo... humans proven capable of almost everything horrible. Especially as prison guards, with arrogant, imperialistic leaders.
        My guess weighs in on Greed as a learned behavior, and the primal "innate" state of man homologous to the tropical "stone-age" cultures found in the Phillipines, New Guinea, Amazon, and old Hawaii, especially in those "maternal" societies where the most important man to children is their mother's brother, due to a societal (natural, innate, genetically programmed?) promiscuity that blurs the paternal decendancy. Those types of cultures, as I recall, (scholars claimed) tended to share and not accumulate possessions nor wives. But then the evidence also shows intertribal bickering; "You come from the village of pimples and pus!" Perhaps some genetic roots of this tribalism create the Umwelt for the Developed World's undereducated humans to only see themselves defined by socio-economic strata, which therefore necessitates Greed as a prime mover.

 

© 2002, Mark Plimsoll, LLC

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