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.