“I am trying to finish writing a book on the evolution of cognition, Thought in a Hostile World,” says philosopher Kim Sterelny, author of Dawkins vs. Gould (Icon, 2001).
He finds others have been publishing their work faster than he can read and digest it, so he’s been catching up with Haim Ofek’s intriguing Second Nature: Economic origins of human evolution (Cambridge, 2001). Ofek understates the need for cooperation that trade requires, he says: “Trade cannot flourish in a world in which the strong routinely expropriate the goods of the weak.”
How we escaped that world is the…
