The Evolution of Cooperation

> Out of curiosity, would you say your understanding changed or deepened upon re-reading it? It's hard to do justice to that in a few words. I think I had a different reason for reading it the second time, as opposed to the first time. The first time around, I think I was more reading it because I like to think of myself as an educated, scientific-minded person, and it was one of "those books" that any self-respecting "educated, scientific-minded person" was sort of "supposed to" have read. That and I was mentally already in a place somewhere in the nether regions between "agnostic" and "atheist" and I knew of Dawkins as a strong advocate for atheist thinking, and I guess I was looking for something that might convince me one way or the other. Or maybe that's just post-hoc rationalization on my part, but that's what I felt like I found. I felt much better about just calling myself an atheist after reading the book.…

"Evolution of Cooperation", by Robert Axelrod. He investigates the question of why is it the case that we see so much intra- and inter-species cooperation -- how does it arise if we start from the premise that we are genetically engineered solely to care about our own well being? This book is utterly fascinating on many dimensions, but it is a tremendous look at how to think about a problem so creatively and poke at it in ingenious ways to get amazing insight. Also notable is the fact that his paper (which preceded the book), is one of the most cited papers in academia and is highly influential, yet you won't see anything higher than basic arithmetic in the entire book, and really everything he does is accessible to a normal high-schooler!

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

The Evolution of Cooperation. It puts in formal terms some common sense about interactions among self-interested individuals.