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have been selected for acting rationally, which is supposed to give economists the right to assume that they do, stood behind much of the orthodoxy of twentieth-century economics. It produced such quaint results as Gary Becker’s Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1977) and innumerable successors. None of them seemed to pay any attention to the revolution in behavioral economics. But even if we take seriously the results of cognitive scientists like Gerd Gigerenzer (with Peter Todd), Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (1999), or Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Choices, Values and Frames, we really won’t do any better when it comes to predicting the future. Arms races will always be with us.

It was Friedrich Hayek who realized that neither human intentions nor human planning can produce those enduring human institutions that have a capacity to withstand arms races. Institutions do so only because they are the products of the same evolutionary processes that make arms races inevitable. Some of these insights can be found in his Individualism and Economic Order (1976), available online.

LIVING WITH SCIENTISM

Sam Harris, of atheism fame, gets the role of science in settling moral disputes nearly right in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010). But he mistakenly thinks that science can show the resulting moral agreement to be true, correct, or right. It can’t. Science has no way to bridge the gap between is and ought. That is why secular humanism can’t do the job secular humanists wrongly think needs to be done. The end of Philip Kitcher’s wonderful introduction to Darwin and its impact on theism, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (2007), tries its best to make a case that there is a real religious need that something like secular humanism should take seriously.

The overwhelmingly powerful argument that determinism and moral responsibility are just logically incompatible was given its most powerful contemporary expression by Peter van Inwagen in An Essay on Free Will (1983). His argument should remind us of Kant’s dictum that attempts to reconcile determinism and free will are “wretched subterfuges,” and “word jugglery.” The subterfuge goes back to Hume. To check out latter-day proposals for how to reconcile free will and determinism, read Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room (1984) or Freedom Evolves (2003).

Some moral philosophers are luck egalitarians. They argue that luck—good or bad, shouldn’t be allowed to have any impact on “distributive justice”—roughly how much money and other good things people have and how much they are paid. That should be determined only by their ambitions and wise choices. Susan Hurley explores these ideas in Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (2003). Of course, there aren’t any free choices, and ambitions are as much luck as native talents are. The only argument against real egalitarianism is that it will make everyone worse off. That economist’s argument is hard to refute. For a partial antidote, read Meritocracy and Economic Inequality by the greatest American economist, Kenneth Arrow, with coauthors Steven Durlauf and Samuel Bowles (who also participated in the cross-cultural studies of cooperation recorded in Henrich and Henrich’s Why Humans Cooperate, mentioned earlier).

C. P. Snow’s lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1960) was reissued on its 50th anniversary. Less enduring was the ad hominem attack on it and on Snow by the progenitor of preposterous twentieth-century literary theory, F. R. Leavis, in Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (1963). For a properly jaundiced view of literary theory from Leavis to Derrida, read the second edition of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (1996).

Little of Epicurus survives, but what does is available online. The greatest Epicurean work, De Rarum Naturum, or On the Nature of Things, was actually written in the first century ad, about 350 years after Epicurus’s death, by Lucretius. This great Latin work in the form of an epic poem is available online in English. If Lucretius