A Passion for Cooperation

Front matter

“Bob Axelrod is the very rare sort of sc Cae impact on numerous disciplines will reverber ae the generations” —from the Foreword

A Passion for Cooperation

ADVENTURES OFA WIDE-RANGING SCIENTIST

PART II. BEING THERE 6. Berkeley in a Time of Troubles, 1968-74

7. Walking the Interdisciplinary Walk at Michigan, 1974-

PART Ill. COOPERATION 8. Tournaments

g. Evolution

10. Trench Warfare xl

31 36

45 52 56 viii CONTENTS PART IV. SELF-ORGANIZATION 12. Minimizing the Strangeness of Bedfellows 13. Social Polarization

PART V. SEX AND CANCER 15. The Reason for Sexual Reproduction

16. Cancer as Social Dysfunction

PART VI. OUTSIDE THE IVORY TOWER 17. Opposing the Vietnam War 18. Trying to Reduce the Risk of War

19. Countering Hostile Influence

PART VII. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 20. Crossing the Moat

21. Looking Forward

Acknowledgments Notes

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL:

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. In the Oval Office, March 6, 1961 14 Figure 2. The BACH group in the late 1980s 4o Figure 3. Receiving the National Medal of Science from

President Barack Obama, November 20, 2014 69 Figure 4. Possible alignments on the eve of World War II 75

Figure 5. Rich Davis, me, Scott Atran, and Safwat Hegazi in Cairo, October 2012 125

Foreword

One day in 1982, during my three-year stint as a columnist for the venerable magazine Scientific American, I received a package (it was, after all, the snail-mail era) from a professor of political science at the University of Michigan named Robert Axelrod. The package contained a letter plus a book in draft form. In his letter, Prof. Axelrod described an abstract game played with numbers called “Prisoner’s Dilemma?” (PD for short), which fascinated me because of its quasi-paradoxical nature. In a nutshell, the angelic side of your nature wants to cooperate with the other player, as mutual cooperation will bring you both three points—but a sly little devil whispers in your ear that not cooperating—technically called defecting— will bring you five big ones (provided the other player cooperates, in which case they will get zilch). But if you both defect, each of you gets just one measly little point. Damn!

What to do? Cooperate and hope your partner does too, but also risk getting nothing at all? Or defect and hope for five points, but also risk getting only one? It’s a tricky dilemma, and the more you think about it, the trickier it gets. And what strategy to follow if you're playing many games in a row with the same partner (or should I say “adversary”?), and can react instantly to their behavior? Prof. Axelrod explained in his letter that he’d recently conducted a PD tournament in which over sixty computer programs had all vied with one another, over a couple of hundred rounds of this game, to come out with the highest total score. To his great surprise, it was the very simplest strategy—a nearly trivial strategy called TIT FOR TAT—that had emerged victorious. TIT FOR TAT always opens angelically by cooperating, and thereafter it merely echoes whatever its frenemy did last time.

The manuscript that Prof. Axelrod had enclosed gave details in a very xii FOREWORD lucid fashion, and in conclusion he politely asked whether I would consider writing about his computer tournament in one of my “Metamagical Themas” columns. It was such a thought-provoking topic that I couldn’t resist, so in May 1983 I wrote my column on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, on the tournament, on various rival strategies, and on why TIT FOR TAT was so successful. In writing it, though, I unexpectedly got so hooked on the PD that I wound up devoting my June column to variations on the theme, and in it I even announced my own worldwide tournament of a related numbers-game that I called the “Luring Lottery,” on whose results I reported in my September column. The PD and its close cousins, including the “Tragedy of the Commons,” became one of the most engrossing topics I had ever encountered.

Not long after that, a small cabal of professors at the University of Michigan collectively invited me to join them on the faculty there. That would mean leaving Indiana University, which had been my warm home for seven years. But these four professors—Arthur Burks (philosopher and mathematician), Richard Nisbett (cognitive psychologist), John Holland (computer scientist and lifelong student of evolution), and Robert Axelrod (political scientist and game theorist)—were all highly original thinkers whose intellectual company would be hard to match. After serious deliberation, I made the pivotal decision to join them in Michigan.

I'll never forget my first visit to Ann Arbor, nearly forty years ago, when I got to know Bob Axelrod and his sparklingly lively wife, Amy Saldinger. They hospitably put me up in their home, and ever since then, we have all remained close. Over the years, Bob and Amy’s friendship has grown ever more precious to me.

I carefully read the early version of Bob’s book and thought it was as good as gold, and so, to help him get it into print, I put him in touch with my publisher, Martin Kessler, at Basic Books in New York. Kessler was quickly persuaded of the depth and power of Bob’s ideas, and it wasn’t long before The Evolution of Cooperation appeared, and it made quite a splash. In fact, it has become a classic text—truly a beautiful and deep contribution to thought about how life works.

Fast forward roughly thirty years. When Bob turned seventy, there was a splendid celebratory event in Ann Arbor that I attended, and I heard talk after talk by Bob’s former doctoral students and other col-

FOREWORD xiii leagues explaining the extraordinary variety of Bob’s research projects over several decades. I was bowled over, as I had been entirely unaware of the richness and breadth of his non-PD research. I also was most amused when, at the very end, Bob himself gave a short, modest talk in which he told the assembled crowd some of his “life principles” that he’d distilled into short and punchy maxims. One of my favorites was this one: “Don’t ever teach a course for the first time.” What a gem of a quip, and it has so much truth to it!

During a question-and-answer session, I brought up a point that I think might be interesting to mention here. In Bob’s computer PD tournaments, the inanimate programs of course had no feelings of empathy; they were all just trying to outscore other programs, and yet, most strikingly, it turned out that pure self-interest led to the dominance of a TIT FOR TAT-ish type of cooperative behavior. I felt, however, that Bob’s approach left out one key source of human cooperation, which is that we humans can’t help identifying with other creatures (usually other humans, even fictional ones); we care about them because we feel we live partly inside them, and they live partly inside us. Many humans feel this way also about pets, sometimes even about stuffed animals! We project ourselves naturally into others and do kind deeds for them, without ever expecting to gain anything from so doing.

In my question to Bob, I asked whether this kind of human behavior was a different type of cooperation requiring a different type of explanation. An example I cited was late one night when I’d bought something at a twenty-four-hour convenience store and walked out, overlooking a $20 bill on the counter, which was most of my change. The clerk dashed out the door and presented me—a total stranger—with the $20 bill. Perhaps he didn’t want me to feel pain at some later point when I checked my wallet and saw the lack of $20 that I should have had. Or maybe he didn’t even think I would ever notice the absence of a $20 bill, but he simply felt that it belonged to me, and he didn’t want me to be deprived of something that was mine. My question to Bob concerned what he thought about such acts of kindness toward other sentient beings—acts that come out of identification of oneself with others, rather than out of unconscious inbuilt strategies that evolved in the billion-year-old story of merciless dog-eat-dog evolutionary competition.

xiv FOREWORD

In his answer, Bob stated that programs that play the iterated PD are egoists seeking only to maximize their scores, and are thus by definition not altruists. What fascinated him was the thorny question of how cooperation could emerge even among egotists. However, he agreed that in actual human life, altruistic acts are important, and can take place even between strangers.

A couple of years ago, Bob told me that he had started writing a memoir of his adventurous life. I was very happy to hear this news, and when he sent me a draft, I devoured it with excitement. The first couple of chapters were marvelously vivid in portraying the development of a young mind driven by insatiable curiosity and lots of self-confidence. I was surprised to learn how much he had savored intense competition and how successful he’d been at it. For instance, as a high school senior he won a Westinghouse Fellowship, one of just five in the country, and was welcomed to the White House by President John F. Kennedy. At that time, young Bob wrote an amazingly prescient statement about his own future, hinting at many of the paths he subsequently followed. In reading these early chapters of the book, I got a kick out of coming to know Bob as an adolescent, and could easily imagine how we might have been great friends had we known each other way back then.

At the University of Chicago, Bob took courses not just in math and political science (his top loves) but also in the humanities, thereby becoming a lifelong fan of impressionism and of classical music. I was amused to read, however, that for a while he semibelieved that the distinction between major and minor in music was just a hoax concocted in order to make him look foolish.

During his college years, Bob spent a summer at the Hudson Institute, a think tank founded by nuclear-war theorist Herman Kahn. As Bob puts it, “It didn’t bother me that I was a liberal dove and he was a conservative hawk.” Such open-mindedness is so typical of Bob’s style. For instance, in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, Bob was one of the organizers of the Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, a major protest in Washington, DC. And yet, in order to make it come off smoothly, he met and cooperated in a civil manner not only with officials from the Washington, DC Police Department but also with representatives from the Nixon White House!

FOREWORD XV

A pervasive theme of Bob’s life is that he has not just wanted to understand the world, but also has always had a deep desire to make a difference, however small. Ever since his late teenage years, when he was so deeply struck by the very frightening Cuban Missile Crisis, he has yearned to contribute to making the world a better and more secure place. In fact, he declares, “My game theory work on cooperation was initially motivated by a search for ways in which two egoistic actors, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, could avoid conflict.”

Not just an ivory tower theorizer on the evolution of cooperation, Bob has long striven to practice what he preaches. He has traveled far and worked hard to try to reduce tensions in serious conflicts in diverse regions of the world, ranging from arms control involving the US and the Soviet Union, to the United Nations peacekeeping efforts in the shattered area once known as Yugoslavia, to the ever-fluctuating, unpredictable tension between Israelis and Palestinians. Thanks to his prominence as an advocate of cooperation and also to his nonconfrontational stance, Bob has been able to meet with powerful individuals of radically different cultures and belief systems, such as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the leaders of several Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although all these individuals belong to severely clashing religious and ethnic groups, Bob has managed to conduct civil and productive discussions with them, and has done his best to find common ground and has sought creative ways to forge agreements, no matter how inflexible and hard-line such people’s public pronouncements might have been.

All of this hard work to try to make a difference, however small, has taken great physical and intellectual courage, but it has paid off, in that Bob’s academic work and his practical work have complemented and enriched each other: his game-theoretical research into cooperation has enabled him to meet with and make suggestions to people in positions of high power, thus changing the world for the better, and his interactions with them have in turn helped him to refine and generalize his theoretical understanding of how cooperation can evolve.

I’ve now read Bob’s adventures a few times, and I’ve always found that the later chapters in the book are considerably tougher going than xvi FOREWORD the earlier ones, as they describe many facets of his scientific research and his idealistic political work using language that I am not very familiar with, but each time, when I’ve stepped back and taken a broader view, I’ve found them exhilarating, a bit like viewing a spectacular mountain range from afar.

If I were in a position to do so (which I certainly am not), I would nominate Bob for a Nobel Prize in economics, because his research on the emergence of cooperation and organization has shed such important light on how societies work, ranging all the way from cancer cells to insects to human beings. But even if the Nobel Committee hasn’t yet seen the light, the MacArthur Foundation saw it a long time ago, in awarding him one of its coveted Genius Grants, and so did President Barack Obama, in awarding him a National Medal of Science. Such recognitions were deeply deserved. After all, it’s not every scientist whose articles have been cited over 90,000 times. This is an enormously large figure, and yet it gives only the slightest hint of how huge has been the influence of Bob’s manifold discoveries on our scientific understanding of how cooperation and organization can spontaneously emerge from competition.

Iam proud to be a close friend of someone so brilliant and simultaneously so humble, and I am so glad that Bob chose to share with the world the story of the development of his inquisitive mind, his ingenious ideas, his wide-ranging research program, and his ever-fresh attempts to make a difference, however small. He is the very rare sort of scientist whose impact on numerous disciplines will reverberate down the generations, and I hope that this little book will not only fascinate many readers, but will inspire younger readers to join in the exploration of the vast and intricately crisscrossing world of intellectual pathways that Bob, cooperating with his students and colleagues, has revealed and opened up.

Douglas Hofstadter February 2023

PART I E

A SPLENDID EDUCATION

CHAPTER 1 ee FAMILY, MATH, AND COMPETITIVENESS

My brother Dave and I were the first in our family to go to college.

Our mother, Rose, was born in Warsaw in 1913. When World War I broke out, her father mutilated his trigger finger so that he would not have to use a gun to fight. He was drafted into the czarist army anyway. As one of the few literate soldiers in his unit, he became the company clerk. In 1920 he picked up his family and moved to the United States, settling on the West Side of Chicago. Had he not emigrated, he and the rest of his family would been wiped out in the Holocaust, as were so many of his relatives who stayed behind.

Much later, Dave asked Grandpa Charles, “Did you really think that the streets in America were paved with gold?” He responded, “It was better than that. In Poland parents could be arrested for trying to get their child into school. In America parents could get arrested if they did not bring their child to school.”

In the United States, my mom’s childhood was very difficult. With her parents and two younger sisters, she lived behind their parents’ delicatessen. The living quarters were divided from the store by primitive threequarter-height partitions, not regular walls. Every sound from the store came into where they lived, and consequently there was no privacy or quiet. A sheet divided the living room from the bedroom area, which was itself subdivided by another sheet beyond which lay the toilet and a large tin enameled tub. Living in such a closed space and working long hours, her parents bickered a lot, which couldn’t have been easy on my mom.

School too was hard for my mom: she arrived as a seven year old with no knowledge of English and an undiagnosed severe near-sightedness. At grammar school she was placed in a room for the “Handicapped,” where she was set to work making pot holders, paper cutouts, and drawings. Immigrants with three small children, struggling to make ends meet in their “ma and pa store,” her parents had neither the time nor the knowledge to sort things out at school. Her true problem remained undiscovered until another greenhorn, a nineteen-year-old cousin—incredulous that this lively and seemingly intelligent little girl could not be taught to read or write—took her to Hull House, which was one of the country’s first private settlement houses that served the needy including recent emigrants. Hull House provided her with her first pair of glasses. Putting them on, she recalled that the world seemed to hit her in the face.

My mother had a deep sense of curiosity. She was an avid reader with a wide range of interests such as comparative religion and current events. She eventually earned enough credits in adult education classes to have the equivalent of a college degree. She was ambitious for her sons and was very proud when both became professors.

My father, James, was a second-generation American who grew up in Chicago as one of eight children. His father was an Orthodox Jew who owned a small tailor shop. Like my mother’s family, both sides of my father’s family came from eastern Europe: Minsk on his father’s side, and the small town of Milawa in Poland on his mother’s side.

My father developed an early love of drawing and painting in watercolors. He made a modest living at it by becoming a commercial artist, usually bringing work home in the evening. This gave him the opportunity to create art, albeit art produced for advertisements. If someone had asked Dad to describe himself professionally, he’d have said, “I’m a freelance artist.” The “freelance” part was very important. Dad valued his freedom and independence. He never had a steady income or knew where the next month’s job would come from, or even whether there would be a job next month. For someone who grew up in the Depression, this required a great deal of courage: a strong belief in himself, as well as an optimism that things would work out.

While commercial art was his bread and butter, his real love was watercolors. He loved to paint boats, intricate trees, Chicago scenes, Jewish themes, and especially farms. As a kid, I was fascinated to see him

FAMILY, MATH, AND COMPETITIVENESS 5 explore the countryside looking for a typical farm, and I would watch him paint his version of it. The cows might turn out purple, but under the shade of a tree, they would look like they ought to be purple. From my dad I learned of the possibility of earning a living doing what you want to do, as well as the fulfillment that comes from creative expression. I learned from Dad that work can be joyful, that work can be play, that work can be a form of self-expression. And that work can be inspiring, giving pleasure not only to oneself, but to others as well. I also learned from seeing that he never had an unkind word to say about anyone.

My parents had a wonderful marriage, being totally devoted to each other. They lived in a small apartment, where Dave and I shared the one bedroom, and my parents slept on a foldout couch in the living room. Although we were not rich in wealth, we were rich in care and compassion.

I often heard Mom complain to Dad about minor things, and she frequently tried to get me to take her side. As a child, I couldn’t stand it. Much later, I realized that much of the problem was that my mother regretted that my dad remained a freelance artist rather than starting an ad agency so he could build a business. His staying self-employed meant that although he worked long hours they couldn’t keep up with their high school peers who had gone on to professional careers in fields such as law, business, and medicine. Perhaps their arguing, minor as it was, was the beginning of my lifelong drive to understand how to promote cooperation.

To my brother, Dave, who was three years older than me, I must have been quite a pest, since I always wanted to follow him to play with him and his friends. I always wanted to do everything he could do—and, if possible, do it better. Although I was competitive with him, he was always supportive of me. It took me about fifty years to get over it. (But more on that later.)

My earliest memory of competitiveness goes back to when I was about thirteen. The teacher gave our class the challenge of coming up with the most words that could be spelled with the letters of “constitutional.” We had one week. I and some others came up with a few dozen words in the first day. But then I realized that I’d have to do something systematic to win. So I gota large dictionary and went through it page by page. It didn’t take as long I had first expected, since I could skip sections with R or E, for example. As I recall, I found about 700 words that week, easily winning the contest and getting the promised prize—a nicely illustrated book I could show off to the class. I discovered that a little diligence could goa long way.

When my parents were able to move from their one-bedroom apartment in Chicago, they bought a small house in the suburb of Evanston because of its excellent public schools. My first joy of seeing beauty in mathematics came at age thirteen while I was learning a form of symbolic logic called Boolean algebra. I saw that Boolean algebra was simpler and more elegant than regular algebra. For example, I was particularly impressed that, in Boolean algebra, addition distributes over multiplication as well as vice versa.’ I felt like someone who had just gotten a glimpse of previously unimagined possibilities and wonders beyond their one village.

When my mom realized that I was interested in math, she suggested I might become a certified public accountant. I didn’t know how to explain to her that what attracted me to math was abstraction and beauty, and I didn’t see that in accounting.

In retrospect, I see a connection between my father’s process of creating a new visual representation of a scene and a mathematician’s process of developing beautiful new math. I came to see my later work in math modeling as analogous to my father’s watercolors. In both pursuits, the idea was to represent something in a new way that displayed an interesting conception of reality by focusing on some of its aspects and setting aside other aspects that would get in the way of appreciating what this new view of things has to offer.

From about the same time, I distinctly remember a middle school assignment to find out what the police and firefighters of Evanston thought about a proposal to give them cross-training. It seemed like a very sensible idea to me. I called one of the local fire stations and asked the person who picked up the phone what he thought about the cross-training plan. While memory isn’t reliable, I can still recall the answer I got: “I don’t know anything about that, but we're all against it down here.” This was my first research project and it made an impression on me because I learned a lot. I learned that (a) what I thought was a good

FAMILY, MATH, AND COMPETITIVENESS 7 idea might not seem at all good to the people involved, (b) one can have an opinion without information, and (c) if the opinion is based on the opinion of others who share one’s values, it may not be so silly after all.

For leisure on Saturdays I would often go the John Crerar Library in downtown Chicago. The library specialized in science, technology, and medicine. Amid its open shelves I was free to explore to my heart’s content. I recall reading military magazines, the British humor magazine Punch, and both Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines. It was the start of my lifelong habit of browsing a wide variety of journals and magazines, and learning about interesting things I hadn’t known even existed.

On aless pleasant note, the anxiety of the Cold War was brought home to me as a twelve year old in 1955 when our school had a civil defense drill in which we cowered under our desks in anticipation of nuclear war.

Chapter 2 E Computers And Modeling

I had the very good fortune of attending Evanston Township High School, one of the best public high schools in the nation. While there, I tried out all sorts of things to see what I would like and what I was good at: debate, chess, student government, math, and even wrestling. I found the most success in math, becoming captain of the math team that won second place in a national competition sponsored by the Future Engineers of America.

I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I was told that the varsity wrestling team desperately needed someone who would qualify for the ninetyfive-pound category. As I was slight of build, I fit the bill; as it turned out, though, I wasn’t much help after all. But something fun came out of it when I became intrigued by the drops of condensed perspiration falling from the ceiling and splattering onto the slick mats below. After leaving the wrestling team, I started playing around with an eyedropper, squeezing one drop of colored water at a time onto a sheet of paper from a height of several feet. After the drops dried, I measured their diameter on the paper and saw how their size systematically varied with the height from which I dropped them. I was also curious about whether a thicker liquid would change the size of the splatter, so I mixed the water with measured amounts of glycerin. After measuring several hundred dried spots on paper, I was able to plot the diameter of the spot as a function of the height from which it was dropped and the percentage of the thickening agent. The result was a series of regular curves that showed the effect on the size of the splatter due to the interaction between the height of the drop and the thickness of the liquid. I then turned this into a science fair exhibit. Searching for some application, I offered the not-too-impressive claim that this method could be used to measure the viscosity of a liquid without having to do any mechanical measures with a well-calibrated stirring device. It seems that, even as a high school sophomore, I wanted to find a practical application for my observations.

I received a top award in the Illinois State Science Fair and an extraordinary letter from one of the judges: “You saw there were laws to be uncovered in the familiar phenomena of falling drops. The ability to see regularity where others do not is the major quality which distinguishes the great scientist from his fellow beings.”

I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of intellectual competition. This urge was especially strong in high school. At that time, I entered many math and science competitions. I also worked hard to earn good grades on tests and a strong overall grade point average. I even compared my SAT scores with my peers in the honors courses I took. Overall, I saw myself as virtually never at the top, but always pretty close. For example, I graduated twelfth of 800 students, and I never got a perfect 800 on any SAT exam, while more than half of my peers did. The challenge provided by the twenty or so high school classmates in these college prep courses was the toughest daily competition among a small group of friends that I’ve ever had throughout my education and subsequent career.

In high school, I had a history teacher who had been an assistant professor at Northwestern University. He told my class that the American Historical Association was holding its annual meeting in Chicago, and high school students would be welcome to sit in on any of the presentations. Being curious about what academic research looked like, I went, and I heard a talk about using the statistics of word usage to attribute specific Federalist Papers to one of the three possible authors based on their known writings. I liked the idea of using quantitative analysis to answer interesting political questions. It was my first exposure to the academic world, and I liked what I saw.

An important move in my life came when Steve Crocker, my good friend and fellow math enthusiast, invited me to join him in teaching ourselves how to program a computer. I accepted his challenge with glee. This would have been in the fall of 1959 when we were juniors in high school. With Steve’s playfulness and infectious enthusiasm we became lifelong friends. Steve went on to an illustrious career as one of the pioneers in developing what became the internet. One of his most helpful contributions was the founding of the “Request for Comments” series that served as the mechanism for achieving global consensus for how diverse computers should communicate with each other. Although he is too modest to admit it, he helped establish the cooperative culture that was vital to the rapid progress of scaling up the early small early network of computers at a handful of universities to the five billion users of the internet today. Steve was so successful at building trust that he was elected to chair the board of ICANN, the global organization that helps coordinate the allocation and assignment of the internet’s addresses and domain names.