I'm rooting for tortoise & betting on RWN.
Ridley basically concludes that the modern free market is the most sophisticated example of an evolved system of cooperation.
Which of course is based on Christian thinking.
Which actually meshes with with what tortoise says about IPD.
If Jesus said, "Verily I say unto you: When you drop a rock from a great height, it seeks the Earth from whence it came with greater rapidity the longer time passes since it left thy hand", it would be an accurate statement. . . .Eventually, modern physics would describe the constant acceleration of an object being pulled by gravity.
First, that's not necessarily true. Who says modern physics had to come into existence?
Second -- and more to the point -- if the common wisdom was that the rock slowed as it fell, and whole governments and cultures and modes of behavior were based on the slowing rock, then Jesus' observation would be inarguably profound and significant regardless of the passage of 17 centuries before the math could be found to back it up.
Yeah, if the common wisdom was that the rock slowed as it fell off the cliff. What I'm trying to illustrate is, the Golden Rule is not very surprising. By the time most people have grown up into mature adults, some form of the Golden Rule is understood to be obviously true. So when an adult starts preaching the Golden Rule and then says, "oh, by the way, I'm God," the fact that he's preaching the Golden Rule is hardly evidence of his superhuman intellect & wisdom.
I gotta say the more I think about it, the more I agree with JS. My initial reaction to tit-for-tat made me overlook that the optimal strategy in IPD is to "forgive" (cooperate) even if he has defected any times in the past. Also the concept of treating others as I would want to be treated. If I was engaging in behavior that was causing other(s) harm, I would (in the long run) want to be corrected for it.