[Quinn]

Right, should have added "but I'll keep looking." I don't think you've lost your knack, more likely that it's Google we're talking about, and a beta at that. I'll check the same engines I would have used last year and try to find something specifically related to this topic.

Going back to evolution and greed - here's what my prof had to say (Dr. Hugh Notman, normally of the U of C anthropology dept., specifically, primatology, he studies chimps, but teaches a few animal behaviour courses here and there):

Evolutionary psychology [in short, looks] at how much of our behaviour (all the way from grubby capitalism as a whole to how individuals choose which seat in a movie theatre to sit in!) has been shaped by our evolutionary past, and how selection has favoured certain behavioural tendencies that were beneficial to our ancestors (which could include early humans but also go all the way back to our early mammalian forbearers). Certainly the quest for material wealth and gain could, in theory, be rooted in our animal heritage in which "Contest competition" for resources meant get as much as you can now before someone else gets it all, and I for one have no problem believing that our short-sighted consumerism (at the expense of impending environmental doom!) is linked to this very primitive behavioural trait. There are, however, nay-sayers who make a good arguement for the fact that not all traditional human societies are/were as individualistic as modern industrial western ones. however, there is also evidence to show that these societies imposed strict social conformity - in other words, "greed" needed to be socialized out of people and they were "trained" to be more egalitarian than human nature would otherwise be! Also, small bands of people could be "non-environmental" in their practices (ie., hunt as much as they want/ slash and burn, etc) without too much global impact, whereas we, onbviously [sic], cannot. Saying that, it is believed that much of the megafauna that lived in America and Eurasia (like big cats, wooly mammoths and wooly rhinoceros) went extinct becasue of early human hunters. As for greed and territoriality, well, the latter is really just "defensive" behaviour - ie, keep others away from your turf. Maybe picket fences and security systems are more akin to good old territoriality than "greed"!