Evolution of Cooperation
Boulding, Kenneth E.
brocade, rosewood and tromp-l'oeil frescos, the Venturas occupy themselves with the tedious rituals of idleness and hypercivilization. Ignored except when they are petted, the thirty-three...
...The imagination of writer and reader are to merge "in a world where the appearance of reality is always accepted as appearance, with an authority all its own...
...Denial has worked for longer than anyone can remember...
...One wonders for how long, and what Augusto Pinochet would make of this dark and various fable...
...When plot matters, one doesn't give it away...
...One hopes particularly that the people in the strategic sciences will follow this clue, for they frequently assume that nobody ever learns anything...
...In both these rounds, however, a very simple strategy emerges at the top, interestingly enough, developed (Continued on page 314) Commonweal: 310 Edward Schillebeeckx [] CHRIST The Experience of Jesus as Lord "More than any other biblical or systematic theologian, he has set forth the early Christian experiences of Christ...
...256pp $9.95 pbk Sebastian Moore [] THE INNER LONELINESS Profound insights from a modern spiritual master "about confronting and healing the dee_pest human alienation...
...The country house, called Durraghglass, is inhabited by four elderly survivors of a once-prosperous AngloIrish family: a bachelor named Jasper Swift and his three sisters, April, a widow, and May and June, both spinsters...
...It is a very important contribution i- i,~elf to the general theory of human interaction...
...another, better age while trying at the same time to ignore the various skeletons hanging in the family closet...
...This is work that still remains to be done in all the many fields that Axelrod has touched upon...
...224pp $9.95 pbk Eugene C. Rianchi [] AGING AS A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY "A most significant contribution to a spirituality of aging...of highest value to anyone concerned with that problem of aging...
...ROBERT MENDELSOHN, M.D...
...It's a nightmare from which, at the end, the author offers us a hope of awakening, a hope which though slight is on the positive side of infinitesimal...
...If the first player, however, introduces a random strategy and does not follow the Tit For Tat behavior -unless his strategy is to always be bad (what Axelrod calls "all D" -- that is, all defecting) -- at some point or other the first player will be good and, of course, the Tit For Tat player will also be good...
...The field which Axelrod has opened up suggests that large improvements could be made in the study of threat systems and the payoffs of organized violence...
...q'he best survey of transplanted Oriental mysticism in America...
...A provocative book rich in insight from clinical material, literature and years of personal reflection," --Library Journal 288 pages $9.95 pbk William Van Ornum and Mary Wicker Van Ornum [] TALKING TO CHILDREN ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR A practical book that deals with feelings and facts and provides guidelines for parents who want to talk but can't find the words...
...176pp $8.95 pbk 370 Lexington Avenue, N( )rk, NY 10017 18 May 1984:311 Commonweal: 312 18 May 1984:313 (Continued from page 310) and played by Anatol Rapoport, who might well be called the father of empirical research in this field...
...The family "dark curtain" is dropped over the demise of eight-year-old Mignon after she roasts her sister Aida in the cellar oven and serves her with an apple in her mouth...
...Theological Studies 928pp $14.95 pbk Christine Downing [] THE GODDESS Mythological Images of the Feminine How the great female figures of Greece illuminate the experience of contemporary women...
...Rich in case studies...
...The single double decision is called a "game," a picturesque but not really very descriptive term...
...We could also read arm and disarm, not cheat and cheat, trust and betray, and so on through a very long series of human behaviors...
...Axelrod gives a considerable number of very interesting economic, political, and social examples, which he calls cooperation without friendship, or foresight...
...Commonweal 128pp $7.95 pbk loan Timmerman [] THE MARDI GRAS SYN I~OM E Rethinking Christian Sexuality With frankness and humor the author exposes the myths of Christian sexuality and evokes the religious nature of sexual union as a sacred and.social event...
...In the Ventura universe the dark and the unpleasant is simply declared nonexistent...
...No, we're not meant to believe it...
...Interaction" would perhaps be better...
...Gregory A. Schirmer T IME AFTER TIME is set in a large, dilapidated country house in the south of Ireland, the emblem of a class -- the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy -that once dominated nearly every phase of Irish life, but now exists largely as a tattered remnant of its impressive history...
...A book to be read and reread...
...Thus, if both players use this strategy and the first starts by being good, the other will be good, and both will be good indefinitely...
...Each of the Swifts is physically disabled -- Jasper lost an eye in a childhood accident, April is deaf, May is missing three and a half fingers from her fight hand, and June suffers from dyslexia -- and these defects suggest and reinforce the characters' more crippling Commonweal: 314...
...It crosses all the disciplines in the social sciences...
...Robert Axelrod notes that this was "invented in about 1950 by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher and formalized by A. W. Tucker shortly thereafter...
...The author has stationed himself at our elbow to warn us that in spite of the misleading verisimilitude of his narrative, we're re~ ting a fable, an "artifice...
...THEODORE ROSZAK 262pp $9.95 pbk Ninian Smart and Richard B. Hecht [] SACRED TEXTS OF THE WORLD , A Universal Anthology The most comprehensive anthology available today...
...Applicable to real life...
...The idealistic brother-in-law who became too interested in the natives has been declared mad and imprisoned in a tower from which his shouts are declared inaudible...
...It is interesting that none of these three authors appears in the otherwise excellent bibliography, which suggests perhaps how little noticed it was at the time...
...bad" was squealing on the other...
...In many ways, this is a landmark Poisoned swan songs TIlE AFTER TINE Molly Kesne Knopf, $13.95, 249 pp...
...Perhaps the most important conclusion of the book is that "the foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship...
...A strategy is a stable relationship between a present decision and a perception or record of n previous events...
...The Axelrod contribution consists, first, of two extraordinary experiments, two long series of individual games between pairs of players following a considerable variety of strategies...
...Suffice it to say that there are survivors from this fictive past to history's continuing nightmare of present and future...
...This, however, is because both cooperation and trust come out of a learning relationship, and learning itself is a function of the durability of the relationship...
...Donoso, who forsook the realism of his early work for the hallucinatory modernism of his Obscene Bird of Night, here addresses his readers with nineteenth-century directness and more than nineteenth-century frequency, asking us to acknowledge "that such old-fashioned machinery, now in discredit, may yet give results as substantial as those offered by more modern convent i o n s . . , with their secret arsenal of illusion...
...The Venturas know little enough about the noisome cellars where the lackeys sleep, and neither lackeys nor masters know of the salt mine beneath them, or the tunnel that leads to the native settlement on the river they pollute with their sewage, or the lightless room which still holds the brilliant feathered costumes confiscated from the natives generations ago, symbols of their pride as their nakedness is of their degradation...
...this is something that seems hard to put into formal experiment...
...In this experiment it does not seem to be possible to change strategies through a learning process...
...Molly Keane belongs tO that world, and in this novel, her second written under her own name (she wrote eleven novels and four plays under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell), she creates a world poisonously folded in upon itself and its past, feeding on the memories of study...
...Donoso, who published A House in the Country in Spain, has returned to Chile, where he is once again working and teaching...
...If they are both good, they are both better off...
...In formal game theory, the word for good i s " cooperate" and for bad is "defect...
...Part of the strategy is to start by being good...
...If they are both good, it may pay one of them to be bad, at convert them to weapons, let in the natives, and image a revolution for their parents to put down, only themselves to be . . . . But enough...
...The prisoner's dilemma can be described very simply even without the familiar diagram...
...Interesting examples from economics involve various forms of moderation of competition in the market...
...Examples from politics include the development of cooperative relationships between the regulators and the regulated, cooperation among Congressmen, the possibilities of a disarmament race, the development of cooperative solutions to international conflict, like the Israeli-Egyptian problem, and the development of very complex forms of reciprocity in all social relations...
...The implication of the whole model is that there is a certain prejudice in the whole evolutionary process towards being nice, towards cooperation, even though, of course, there may be niches in it for the nasty and the uncooperative...
...Kenneth E. Boulding S OMETIMES in the course of the evolutionary process, whether biological, societal or intellectual, a mutation, an invention, or an idea that seems very simple and might not be noticed much at the time sets off an extraordinary phylum of development...
...In this very simple case the strategy is to start by being "good" and then do what the other player did the last time...
...and it pays particularly well for nice people to play with each other, to get together...
...A House in /ie Country exists in an unsettling limbo between family chronicle and social allegory...
...It's crammed with characters and with plot, with information planted and withheld, with turns, twists, and surprises...
...Large, substantial, well-edited, richin its panoply of texts...
...If one is bad, however, it pays the other to be bad, so they end up both being bad and both being worse off than if they both had been good...
...There is a problem here that I do not recall Axelrod mentioning, that if both play Tit For Tat under these circumstances they both stay bad indefinitely, which is why it is important to start by being good...
...Fifteen players participated in the first round and sixty-three in the second, both including a random strategy...
...Best Sellers 192pp $9.95 pbk At bookstores, or write James and Mary Kenny [] WHOLE-LIFE PARENTING "Indispensable for all parents and teachers.., maybe the first wholly practical book that covers every age and every stage of a child's character development...
...The Christian Century 496pp $16.95 pbk Pierre Riches [] BACK TO BASICS Catholic Faith in Today's World A characteristically modern approach to the beliefs of Roman Catholics that both Catholics themselves and interested non-Catholics will find lively, refleshing, and at times surprising...
...148pp $7.95 pbk Eugene Kennedy [] CRISIS COUNSELING An Essential Guide for Nonprofessional Counselors "An outstanding author of books on personal growth selects types of personal crises that our present lifestyle has made commonplace and suggests effective ways to deal with them...
...It is called "Tit For Tat...
...Although it pays both parties enormously to be good, the dynamics of the situation very frequently push them into the bad-bad box, where they are both very much worse off...
...We have two people interacting, each of whom can either be "good" or "bad...
...Journal of Psychology and Theology 176pp $9.95 pbk C ROSS ROAD / CONTI N U U M Louis [)upr~ [] THE COMMON LIFE The Origins of Trinitarian Mysticism and its Development in Jan Ruusbroec New light on a powerful, ancient theme: men and women are images of God because in their deepest essence they are identical with God...
...It is rare in empirical research in human behavior to find an outstandingly clear conclusion which makes sense...
...The principles that do seem to emerge from the formal experiment are that it pays to be "nice" -- that is, have a prejudice in favor of cooperation and being good...
...As its title suggests, Time After Time is about those memories and those skeletons, and, more generally, about the inexorable pressure that the past exerts on the present...
...Provident Book Finder 128pp $6.95 pbk Morton Kekey [] PROPHETIC MINISTRY The Psychology and Spirituality of Pastoral Care "Any Christian counselor, lay or professional, will surely find parts of this remarkable book helpful in counseling...
...it pays tobe forgiving, up to a point...
...Profound, provocative, and moving...
...Axelrod has a very interesting chapter with William D. Hamilton on the evolution of cooperation in biological systems, a little reminiscent of the earlier work of Peter Kropotkin and Clyde Allee, not actually mentioned, and throws some light on the evolution of altruism even in the biosphere, certainly on the evolution of symbiosis...
...CAROL P. CHRIST 256 pages $9.95 pbk Helen Luke [] WOMAN: EARTH AND SPIRIT The Feminine in Symbol and Myth An explanation of the rich and complex legacy of the feminine...
...One sister is blind...
...He has a fascinating chapter on the live-and-let-live system in trench warfare in World War I, which the privates in the trenches developed with their respective enemies, much to the annoyance of their officers...
...The Living Church 112 pages $5.95 pbk Edward Whitmont [] RETURN OF THE GODDE'SS Recovering the feminine aspects of the soul...
...The great house is a labyrinthine universe...
...After curfew their parents assign them to the control of the lackeys, who treat them with the servile cruelty natural when those defined as above them are, in fact, utterly in their power...
...Once we introduce learning into the picture, however, what I have called "noogeaetic evolution" -- that is, the transmission of learned structures from one generation to the next through life experience -- the learning of new strategies becomes a very important element in the evolutionary system...
...Provident Book Finder 224pp $9.95 pbk Jacob Needleman [] THE NEW RELIGIONS With a New Introduction Here are accessible overviews of the ways of Zen, Krishnamurti, Gurdijieff, Transcendental Meditation, among others...
...This book suggests that there is a prejudice in the evolutionary process towards "niceness," even if the strategies of interacting organisms are fixed, which they tend to be in biogenetic evolution...
...What needs to be done now is to try to unite game theory of this kind with learning theory...
...Ignored except when they are petted, the thirty-three children are up to all sorts of tricks, sexual and otherwise...
...The concept stimulated in the interim a large amount of emph'ical research and has thrown light on an extraordinary variety of social situations...
...it is she who talks incessantly of the colors of paintings, fabrics, and flowers...
...If the first player starts by being bad, the second player responds by being bad...
...Such was the idea of the two-person game, especially in its non-zero-sum form, and in the special case of the "prisoner's dilemma...
...Thus the author commands us to distance ourselves from the substantial yet illusory horrors he has imagined -- not only the baroque quotidian cruelties of Ventura family life, but the far worse ones that ensue when adults and lackeys go off for a fete champ~tre and leave the children alone to release the imprisoned idealist, pull up the gold-tipped lances, Crime doesn't pay THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION Robert Axeirod B~ic Books, $17.95, 241 pp...
...In the original story of the two prisoners, "good" was not squealing on the other...
...But these niches tend to remain rather small...
...America 304pp $9.95 pbk Morton Kelsey [] CHRISTO-PSYCHOLOGY "Kelsey at his best...treats the journey to personal faith, the seeker on the journey.., the relation of theology and psychology...
...least in the short run...
...It also, however, suggests that the evolutionary process in this field of human knowledge is still in full swing and has a long way to go...
...96pp $7.95 pbk Robert A. Raines [] A FAITHING OAK Meditations from the Mountain "The writings are designed to renew _9 and heal as we continue the journeys of our lives...
...160pp $8.95 pbk Benedict I. Groe~hel [] SPIRITUAL PASSAGES The Psychology of Spiritual Development This well-balanced book applies insights from contemporary psychology to our traditional understanding of Christian spirituality...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
