The Origins of Cooperation: From Evolutionary Strategy to Decentralized Coordination at Scale

The Origins of Cooperation: From Evolutionary Strategy to Decentralized Coordination at Scale

The natural world is often imagined as a system of competition where predators hunt prey, rivals vie for limited resources, and survival turns on relative advantage. At a deeper level, a quieter competition occurs within all living organisms. As the primary units of selection, genes endure insofar as they successfully replicate. Over evolutionary time, this process has shaped life from its simplest incarnations to complex organisms. Through genetic expression, morphological, physiological, and behavioral traits emerge, giving rise to survival strategies. Across scales, life unfolds under...

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The Welfare State, Evolutionary Game Theory, and Modern Reproductive Tactics

The Welfare State, Evolutionary Game Theory, and Modern Reproductive Tactics

Across the animal kingdom, natural selection has sculpted a remarkable array of reproductive strategies, but humans are unique in that we consciously design institutions that shape incentives and constrain behavior. The modern welfare state highlights this dynamic. As resources are redistributed for paternalistic purposes, the state increasingly supplants functions once anchored in family and kinship. By altering costs and benefits, these interventions create conditions for alternative reproductive strategies to emerge. The patterns of reproductive behavior are illuminated by Robert...

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Eviction Moratorium: A Postmortem on Private Property

Eviction Moratorium: A Postmortem on Private Property

At the beseeching of congressional Democrats and the fanatical urgings of Nancy Pelosi, who called the extension of the federal eviction moratorium a “moral imperative,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a new nationwide ban on evictions for counties with heightened levels of coronavirus community transmission. This latest CDC order comes in spite of President Biden’s candid admission that “the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard attests that the “right to contract...

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