Samuel bowles and herbert gintis debate

War is the answer. Or, at least, it is the answer to several questions social scientists have been asking for hundreds of years. (Why are societies large? Why are there property rights?

Nudges

Why are there highly productive economies? Why are there taxes?) Bowles and Gintis are not the first to claim that competition, conflict, and war between human groups is the foundation of cooperation and of society. However, their integration of this insight into evolutionary game theory stands to increase the accessibility of this powerful idea to a large number of scholars working in a dominant theoretical perspective that spans the social and biological sciences.

This is one reason why I recommend their new book A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution.

Bowles and Gintis develop two arguments about human cooperation and how it evolved.

Samuel bowles and herbert gintis debate on slavery

First, humans are innately cooperative. We are guided by moral sentiments that evolved long ago. These sentiments compel us to act cooperativel