Taking account of our ethical dispositions and the conditions necessary to both enhance and empower cooperative motivations is essential if we are to face the challenges of environmental sustainability, control of epidemic disease, the governance of the information based economy, and political...

Bowles uses computer simulations to generate artificial histories of humanity over tens of thousands of years, tracing alternative trajectories that could explain how we got to be both nasty and nice.

Since Darwin, the evolutionary origin of these and other examples of altruistic cooperation has puzzled biologists and economists where notions of 'selfish genes' and amoral Homo economicus hold sway.