Tit for Tat

Continuing on my Richard Dawkins theme, I came across this period piece, in which Dawkins responds to some early misunderstandings about his pathbreaking work in The Selfish Gene, the treatise of which was that it made more sense to think about natural selection as operating on the level of the gene rather than the organism. He was particularly concerned that people understand that if genes are "selfish," then the behavior of the organism would display a high degree of cooperative behavior.

As an example of this, he discusses Robert Axelrod's seminal work in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, in which a simple tit for tat strategy turns out to be extremely effective. The reasons for its success, as Dawkins summarizes them, are that:

1. It is nice. It seeks to cooperate initially.
2. It forgives quickly after retaliating.
3. It is not envious. It does not measure its status in relative terms. It cannot win in an individual game against a single opponent, and it cannot do well unless other parties also cooperate.
4. It is simple--easy to read and uncomplicated.

Some days, I wish those characteristics were more pervasive in the population.