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In the previous post, we discussed the Prisoner’s Dilemma and saw how a simple strategy called Tit-for-Tat enforced the Golden Rule and won a very interesting contest. But does Tit-for-Tat always come out on top? The most confounding thing about the strategy is that it can never win – at best, it can only tie [...]

Almost every decision we make involves someone else in one way or another, and we face a constant choice. Should we take advantage of them, go for the quick score and hope we never see them again – or should we settle for a more reasonable reward, co-operating in the hope that this peaceful relationship will continue long into the future?

How did humans evolve from early primates? How did “human like” traits such as a smaller jaw relative to apes and hairlessness pop up when they don’t appear in the wild in any real frequency? The typical explanation for why humans have smaller jaws than early primates is that our diets changed and our brains got bigger, pressures that caused a smaller jaw. But there’s another way to look at this – what if our diets changed and our brains got bigger due to proto-human society dealing and adapting to an increasingly frequent and nearly catastrophic mutation of the jaw?

One of the biggest “human” questions is “where did we come from?”. While the mechanisms of evolution are well established, the route humanity took to get to its present state is not as well detemined.

Sometimes we see things so often that we simply forget to ask “why are they like that?” For instance, let’s take a closer look at domestic animals. Dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs – animals that we live with, and who couldn’t live without us.