Why Do We All Behave In The Way We Do?

The Secrets of Life - From Big Bang to Trump

SS O'Connor

• Publisher: Otium Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781839786150
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Why is life like a poker game? How did a failed robbery help to explain human nature? Why are we so certain bad men will win - and yet we're so wrong?
In this, the third volume of The Secrets of Life quartet, SS O'Connor once more uses his easy-going, conversational style to explain how the science of decision analysis developed, and why it has come to show us not only the reasoning behind how humans arrive at their choices in life, but why so much of the apparently bizarre behaviour of the natural world has the same hard logic to it.
Instead of the confusion and chaos one might expect, O'Connor lays out how the options organisms face when they interact can actually be analysed, and how we humans then refined this process through the addition of our intelligence and language skills.
Starting with the extraordinary new ways of thinking that Adam Smith opened the world's eyes to, the book progresses to the 20th century - and shows how the mathematical reasoning behind our thought processes was revealed at a time when the very future of the world was at stake.
From these earliest investigations, through to the fevered disagreements of later experts, this third volume of the Secrets of Life series explains how the science of game theory illuminates the reasons for our behaviour. In particular, the book provides insights into how the interests of the individual should be balanced against those of the group, and why the mechanism of trading would extend far further into our lives than we could ever have imagined.
As the story unfolds it becomes ever clearer how cooperation has evolved to be the catalyst at every level of life. It explains how it was the force that built our world, and why it would settle so deeply in our hardwiring that it's become instinctive and innate in us. Perhaps most pleasingly, the same logic also shows that the benefits of collaboration are always bound to ratchet upwards - and how this will inevitably lead humans to ever-increasing levels of moral behaviour.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The underlying idea behind social contract theory was that laws, authority and order are necessary because they’re not natural things, but human creations. Now someone called Adam Smith was going to show that there was an entirely different way of looking at how society worked. Or how it should work. But who was he - and what did he say?
• Chapter Two: At this point in Adam Smith’s life, nothing he’d written seems to have been about economics. So what came next - and why did his new thinking disagree with what he’d said before? More importantly, how did he resolve the questions around social dilemmas?
• Chapter Three: If Adam Smith was arguing that people’s primary motivation was self-interest (but don’t worry because this ultimately leads to social harmony) then what did he think a government was for? How did he think the constant temptation to cheat could be avoided? And what did he think rulers should do to arrive at the best kind of social contract?
• Chapter Four: John von Neumann? Hardly a household name, is he? But then, not many mathematicians ever become celebrities, even if they do achieve a godlike status among their peers. Yet von Neumann’s reckoned to be the superstar originator of game theory - something that’s often seen as being the key to exposing the secrets of life. But what is it exactly?
• Chapter Five: What kind of scenarios illustrate the fundamental ideas of game theory? And did any of them show that von Neumann’s conclusions might be wrong - and that humans could actually cooperate with each other if they weren’t in total opposition? If so, what came next?
• Chapter Six: So far, game theory just seemed to be reinforcing everyone’s most negative, dog-eat-dog views about how life worked. Now game theorists were going to find out that conflict and fear didn’t have to be the only approaches.
• Chapter Seven: From the early 1950s onwards, game theorists were becoming increasingly convinced that if they could only get the variables right, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma would draw the curtains apart and show how humans decided on their behaviour. But did their computer simulations really make any progress? And if so, what did they find?
• Chapter Eight: Game theorists were seeing the results of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma as confirming the inevitable success of cooperation. But can that really be right? Surely there’s evidence of the opposite wherever we look? Bullies, strong men and horrible types so often seem to win in life rather than the nice guys. So what’s going on?
• Chapter Nine: Surviving, competing, cooperating, trusting, cheating, protecting oneself, succeeding in the fitness war… all the ancient drives used by living things were now being exposed to game theory’s gaze. But could the prisoner’s dilemma show how they all fitted together?
• Chapter Ten: From the early 1970s, a new generation of biologists was increasingly looking at evolution from the ‘gene’s eye’ point of view. However, the problem this gave them was that if the gene was so clever about getting its vehicles to ‘win’, why hadn’t mutations arrived at something that triumphed over everything else?
• Chapter Eleven: By the 1970s the gene-based theory of evolution was being viewed as more than just an interesting new way of looking at life. Understanding the role that altruism played had become the key to seeing the gene as the conductor of life’s orchestra, and organisms as simply the instruments. But who, and what, was going to turn this insight into mainstream thinking?
• Chapter Twelve: Trivers had shown that reciprocal alliances within - and between - species were unquestionably successful strategies for the gene. But how was cooperation ever to take root in a world of widespread suspicion and conflict? Was there a way for collaborative behaviour to evolve? Even to win?
• Chapter Thirteen: So game theory’s conclusion was that cooperation is bound to evolve naturally within societies. But surely that has to be nonsense? Doesn’t everyone agree that the opposite is true… that unless humans are kept under control, they’ll wreck everything with their selfishness and greed?
• Chapter Fourteen: Elinor Ostrom? Who was she? Another person who believed humans were doomed by their selfishness? Or did she think that cooperation might possibly emerge as we dealt with each other?
• Chapter Fifeteen: If people and organisms were prone to getting sucked into always defect stalemates, then how could cooperative reciprocity ever be restored? More to the point, what were the mechanisms that made living things reciprocate anyway?
• Acknowledgements
• Picture credits