"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." --
Gordon Gekko

Evolution has provided many species including human with a greed gene.

The greed gene is essential to ensure optimal functioning of the evolutionary facility within biological entity to store energy.

To understand the greed gene I could explain it in cellular biology terms but there is an easier way.

It is well understood and recognised that similar patterns are reflected throughout the universe, in many aspect and many level of magnitude. So to observe and understand the process of the evolution of the greed gene you need only look at the evolution of the human society.

Way back, the basic unit of our species was a single ‘family’ unit. and just as in the evolution of cells, way back each 'unit' provided all the requirement in-house, so to speak.

Then families units began to co-operatively work as groups. These groups provided additional benefits to each individual unit. Not only were these benefits in a horizontal sense (such as security and food gathering) but also in a vertical sense (such as providing for tasks to be undertaken by a member of the group who could best perform them). Thus evolved specialisation.

Some social examples are warriors and food prepares and in a cellular sence evolved specialized cell and organs like the stomach and fat storage cell.

Like most things though, to gain something you usually have to give up something and the better you are at what you do, the more likely you are hopeless, at almost everything else.

However in all circumstances where benefits outweigh the risks, the adoption of the benefiting behaviour is inevitable.

The demonstration of the evolution of specialisation is most pronounced in the human species at this point in time. Currently within one generation, we now have specialists in just portions of what a specialist, of the previous generation, covered as their entire field.

But specialization is only Part A of the story of the greed gene.

Part B starts with an understanding, easiest explained by a modern example, that there is absolutely no sense in developing computer hardware if you do not have the software to drive it.

Which in evolutionary biological terms means there is absolutely no sense in developing specialised storage cells for energy if you don't have a software program that ensures they are fully utilized. So the greed gene evolved. The function of this gene is to drives an organism to harvest from its environment the maximum amount of resources that are available so as to opromize the use of the stomach and fat storge cells.

When this occurred the organism’s software would send a message to the brain telling it that the warehouse was full and the activity of harvesting and processing should cease until more, on-board storage capacity became available.

We don’t know when the 2nd most profound development in the recent history of the evolution of the human species occurred but probably some where in the last 100,000 years.   Up to that event, the human organism, like millions of other species, could only fill up the storage vessels that were available within the independent unit. There was no facility available to storage off-farm - so to speak.

However with the development of the capacity to use tools, humans were able to manipulate and thereby generate energy storage cells capacity, external to the human body.

This process evolved and by about 20,000 years ago the human species developed the capacity to not only manipulate existing food supplies for long term external storage but developed, with the aid of tools, the capacity to modify the environment to favour the proliferation of advantagous food species plus manilupate the food and construct facilities for the storage of these energy sources.

The impact of this development was to allow the greed gene to be now expressed in such a fashion that satisfaction of the internal storage facilities was no longer the mechanism by which the human drive for accumulation of life supporting energy was regulated, but by this new external capability and capacity.

Energy, in the source of food, could be harvested, treated and stored in quantities several thousand time the capacity of the internal systems and the termination point for expression of the activity was now regulated, not by the persistence of the internal energy storage reservoir but the capacity of external storage facilities.

Although we know the day when the first human ventured into space, we don’t even know the century when the first human developed the most profound event that would shaped the long term sustainability of the human species - money.

Until the invention of money, the expression of the greed gene was regulated by the long term physical restriction placed by the viability of the energy resource produced and stored. Accumulating a million tonnes of mammoth meat was not a stimulatory activity if the resource would inevitably expire. However converting that resource into a long term non perishable reconvertable resource (money) was.

Money, for the first time in the history of this planet provided a species with the capacity to convert perishable energy resource into a non perishable product and a software program that had evolved over a massive period of time, in a self limiting environment, had no failsafe or contingency code to cater for this totally and previously un-encountered phenomenon.

So like the wizards wand, the program keep faithfully feeding the drive instruction to the biological entity to accumulate resource until the storage capacity feed back loop flashed -“FULL”

On top of this, because the storage capacity for money (the converted non perishable reconvertable resource) became even greater and greater as the chosen token changed from metal to fibre and now to cyber, the possibility of reaching the control trigger of FULL grew ever more and more remote, resulting in a totally unregulatable and continuous drive to acquire.

Like a black hole, the greed gene relentiously drives an ever growing fervour to acquire energy, leading to a larger and more energetic entity that in turn expands the capacity to consuming ever more energy and growing even more in consumption capability, with only one possible control - self destruction.          

This process underpins the massive accumilation of wealth, firstly in individuals and more recently in Corporation of which Google is only one of thousands of examples, but the most recent.

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