> CB: My thought on this is that greed refers to wealth which is a
> learned concept. We aren't born with any instinct regarding wealth.
> Our attitudes to weatlh are entirely learned.
> "Kindness" is better termed inclination to live in cooperation with
> other people, This is amenable to a certain amount of instinct, though
> learned as well.
>
> As far as benefits, greed or cooperation could benefit an individual
> in a given context, in the sense of their surviving and having
> offspring. The study in the post argues that predominance of
> cooperation was an adaptive advantage for the _species_ in the long
> historical context in which we came to dominate the ecological niche
> we were competing with some other species for, cooperation,
> sociality, language and culture ( which are highly social activities)
> were advantages over species which were less social. Two heads are
> better than one is the idea; better for the two, for both, than for
> the one by him/herself.
>
We don't have innate desire for wealth, but we probably do for comfort, security, and respect, all of which wealth confers. (Properly speaking, wealth confers almost anything, so an instrumental desire for wealth probably is logically inherent even if not biologically so. A shark would desire wealth if it knew what it was.)
And as you say, both greed and kindness can bring you to your desires, depending on the situation - shouldn't an increased ability to rationally evaluate a situation be sufficient to confer all the changes we need?
> CB: Sure.That's kind of popularizing. However, they didn't have armies
> back then. They were being very kind. Having war would have been
> maladaptive for the earliest humans, since wars involve killing your
> own species members.
>
Then why are so many non-agricultural societies so incredibly violent? Some are quite peaceful, of course - unless the genetic variation of the species is very large, and there's no reason to believe that it is, the explanation isn't really biological.