Cooperation as an evolved strategy; reciprocity and the prisoner's dilemma
Ridley argues that human cooperation and moral behaviour evolved from self-interest rather than despite it, and assembles the evidence from evolutionary biology, game theory and anthropology. The theoretical foundation is the prisoner's dilemma and the iterated version, in which Axelrod's tournaments found that tit for tat, meaning cooperate first and then copy the opponent's previous move, outperformed more complex strategies. Ridley uses this to argue that cooperation is stable where interactions repeat and defection can be detected and punished, which explains why humans cooperate with strangers under some conditions and not others.
He covers kin selection and Hamilton's rule; reciprocal altruism including the vampire bat blood-sharing evidence; the human capacity for detecting cheaters, which experimental work suggests is a specialised rather than general reasoning ability; the role of reputation as a mechanism that makes cooperation with strangers possible; and the specific human adaptations for division of labour and exchange, which he argues distinguish humans from other cooperative species.
His political conclusion is that trust and cooperation emerge from voluntary exchange and from local institutions, and that centralised state intervention frequently destroys the conditions that produce them. He supports this with Elinor Ostrom's work on common resource management, which found that communities regularly solve tragedy of the commons problems through local institutions without either privatisation or state control.
The political argument goes further than the biology supports, which is the standard criticism. The Ostrom material is used selectively, since her findings identify conditions under which local management works rather than establishing that it always does. The reciprocity and reputation material is well grounded.
Readers who want the evolutionary and game-theoretic account of cooperation, with the political conclusions treated as a separate argument.
British science writer and member of the House of Lords, former chairman of Northern Rock, writing on evolution, genomics, trade and innovation.
The Rational Optimist argues that exchange and specialisation, not individual intelligence, drive rising living standards, and assembles the long-run price and productivity evidence behind the claim. How Innovation Works applies the same method to case histories, showing invention as incremental, collective and largely detached from formal research spending.
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