The Best Response to Pseudo Darwinists

As if by intention, which it certainly was not, while looking for something else, I found a copy of a book I had bought around 2009, and which I unintentionally mislaid during my 2010 move to our current house (the chicks had left the nest for their own houses and I had difficulty coping with the stairs to the 3-floors of the family house we lived in). 

Opening a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard, I found my brand new, unread copy of: H. Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, editors 2005. “Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: the foundations of coopertion in economic life”, MIT.

I read the first chapter in 2009 and put the book down somewhere as you do. It was shovelled into a box for the double move and ‘lost’ until last evening.  Some other books are still missing, including my invaluable facsimile “Log of HMS Bounty”(see my ‘Captain Bligh: the man and his mutinies, Duckworth, 1988).

However, I am familiar with the literature of ‘behavioural’ authors, anthropologists, primatologists, sociologists,  evolutionary psychologists and games theorists, which I used in the theories of reciprocation in a work I wrote on the pre-history of bargaining and in my MBA class “Influence” at Edinburgh Business School still attracting several scores of students each year.

These academics fit in neatly with Adam Smith’s work in TMS and WN.

I shall now settle down and read the rest of Gintis, et al.  I am sure I shall enjoy doing so.  No doubt I shall post occasionally on Lost Legacy on significant aspects of bargaining relationships.