good readin

04 Dec 2005

You know the expression “good eatin”? Catfish, for example. Catfish are good eatin. Especially with some fried okra and collard greens. Mmmm.

Anyways, so what was I talking about? Oh, right. So, much like catfish is good eatin’, this is good readin’.

We will see that some humans, too, chose highly risky and discontinuous prey items, and shared the resulting surpluses with non-kin. Indeed, they accomplished this to a far greater extent than the vampire bat. How they did so is the main subject of our essay. Dawkins suggests, “money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism”, but then pursues this fascinating idea no further. We will.

You want to read more, don’t you? How could you not? It’s a fascinating article that starts off as a rather blase fluff piece about the history of currency but then takes a violent, brain-twisting turn into an intersection of anthropology, sociology, economics and .. game theory.

Found via the Mutualist Journal Club.