they found themselves in direct competition within ecosystems. However, at some point the groups began to stretch the envelope of the ecosystem, perhaps migrating into significantly disjoint ecosystems. This led to specialization in the acquisition of food or other materials necessary to allow the group, and the individuals within the group to better adapt to their own specific ecosystem. The development of the market occurred apace.

Initially, the market was probably a physical location that simply provided a place of food distribution. When a variety of foodstuffs became available from different members of the extended group, then the market perhaps became a place to exchange foodstuffs from different members or subgroups. The hunters brought game to the table, the farmers brought wheat and the foragers brought berries and honey. With a healthy dose of self-interest thrown into the mix, it likely became obvious that the effort to acquire these various goods differed greatly, as did the value or desirability of the goods to the rest of the population. While it might have been a relatively frequent occurrence for a hunter to be trampled by a wooly mammoth, or a forager to suffer a number of bee stings during the capture of a comb of honey, the farmer likely didn’t often get attacked by a shock of rampaging wheat. So, the effort to acquire the goods, their basic cost if you will, was significantly different. Likewise, while grain begets bread and hence daily nourishment, a handful of honey now and then was probably an incredible treat and much to be desired; more so than the wheat, at least from time to time. How then to exchange these various materials?

At the extremes of possibility would be confiscation by the strong and powerful at one end of the spectrum and confiscation by the group at the other end of the spectrum. In either case, the middle-man would become the arbiter of goods and services. This, unfortunately, leads to less than desirable results for both the actual providers as well as the consumers of goods and services. Another answer, perhaps somewhere between the extremes, would be to enable a negotiated exchange governed by the concepts of supply and demand, but perhaps restricted by certain governing principles of the group. These principles might well have been determined collectively by the group, or by the governing power elite within the group; the purveyors of policy. The changing environment would likely feed into the situation regarding the bartering of the various products. Through the market, the value of different items could be established through agreement by the supplier and consumer, depending on the availability and desirability of the various materials. Thus, we see the introduction of the concepts of free market supply and demand. How do you establish the value of salt versus the value of grain; the value of oil versus the value of a spice? It all derives from the actual or perceived cost versus the relative worth of the items as determined by interactions between the provider and the consumer.

As markets became even larger, involving more people and more types and sources of goods, the whole concept of barter perhaps became too inefficient to allow the effective interchange of necessary products or services. A common technique through which to address this problem was the creation of, or definition of, a single exchange currency for the market. This required the ability of abstract thought in order to equate tangible goods to the much more intangible concept of currency. The idea was to establish a currency to represent value and then to establish the value of various goods and services in terms of this currency. Once this was done, it became possible to directly compare the values of different goods and also to consider the value of goods in terms of the amount of services necessary for one to provide in order to earn currency with which to buy goods.

Within present day social systems, the foremost grouping mechanism of the abstract market is the company. Companies are made of individual employees, to whom the natural selection principle

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