The Evolution of Cooperation
by Robert Axelrod
The point he is making is that you can use exactly the same mathematics we use in physics and in biology to start to attack more complicated things like this cooperation issue. If you link it back to The Selfish Gene, of course any cooperative behaviour becomes a mystery. Why do we ever actually cooperate with each other? Axelrod really tries to explain this in this book, which generated this whole field of taking the game theory of mathematics and trying to apply it to the social context to understand conflict and cooperation and so on.
