Product Description
Updated for the first time, the classic book on why cooperation is not only natural but also the best survival strategy The Evolution of Cooperation addresses a simple yet age-old question: If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a … More >>
The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition
Originally posted 2010-03-29 17:49:10.
My title is serious. This may be the most important book ever.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book shatters illusions of both the left and the right, and provides a basis for formulating a new theory of social organization.
A hundred years from now people will look back on this book and place it along side works such as ‘The Origin of Species’, ‘The Prince’, and the Declaration of Independance.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was FAR too dense and technical. I bought it expecting to find something comparable to what Richard Dawkins would write. Instead, I found a book that was full of mathematical proofs and descriptions of computer programs. At whom was this aimed? There are very few people who could read something like this intelligently.
One possible organization might have been: Some case studies of varied cases and then a description of the theory why they happened they way they did. And then appendices at the back that contained the proofs.
I didn’t make it past the first chapter, and I suspect that most others won’t.
Rating: 2 / 5
It is really a fantastic book where you can get a lot about the importance of the inter-relationships among people and companies.
Rating: 5 / 5
Though I’ve never seen the two linked elsewhere, this book explains how Linux and Open Source developers can succeed in a world populated by back-stabbing defectors. A wonderful book and an easy read. Recomended for anyone who cooperates.
For business readers, consider Co-opetition by Nalebuff etal and the Death of Competition by Moore.
Rating: 5 / 5