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this trait—sharing the care of the offspring of others—arose independently more than once suggests that it, or whatever triggers it, is a fairly common blind variation. Selection for sharing child care demands improvements in theory-of-mind abilities by species that already have that ability, such as the primates. Now we have a coevolutionary cycle in which shared child rearing selects for improvements in theory of mind, and improvement in theory of mind enhances the fitness of those practicing cooperative child care, and so on, until you get people almost born to cooperate.

These abilities are being selected for in nuclear families or among very closely related ones. But survival requires larger groups of less closely related people to cooperate. Why suppose that there was strong enough selection for cooperation to trump the short-sighted selfish fitness maximization that threatens to unravel the first stirrings of niceness? After all, the nuclear family is not a group large enough to enable us to move up the food chain.

BEAUTIFUL MINDS: CHARLES DARWIN MEETS JOHN VON NEUMANN

This is where evolutionary biology makes common cause with modern economics to identify the design problem’s solution that saved humanity and saves Darwinian theory.

Game theory was invented by Hungarian physicist John von Neumann in the late 1920s. Never heard of him? He designed the first electronic computer, figured out how to build the H-bomb, and invented the U.S. nuclear deterrent strategy during the cold war. How did he manage to remain so anonymous? Mainly because his life was not as dramatic as John Nash’s, another of the founders of the field. Nash’s path from mathematics through madness to the Nobel Prize was such a good story that it was made into A Beautiful Mind, a movie that won four Academy Awards. Von Neumann’s mind was at least as beautiful and his contributions to game theory were at least as important. He started the whole enterprise, and without it we wouldn’t have the solution to Darwin’s puzzle about how core morality is even possible.

The label “game theory” does von Neumann and Nash’s branch of economics a profound disservice; it’s hard to take seriously a bit of science devoted to understanding games. Despite the name, game theory isn’t really about games. It’s about all strategic interactions among people, about how people behave when they have to figure out what other people are going to do so that they can scheme together with them or protect themselves from the schemes of others. Notice that to scheme with or against someone else requires that you have a theory of mind. You have to be able to put yourself in the other player’s shoes, so to speak, and act as if he or she has a mind that makes choices in order to figure out what you should do. Game theory should have been called the theory of strategic interaction, but it’s too late to change names.

Once invented, game theory had rather limited influence outside mathematical economics until it was taken up by evolutionary biologists. Their interest was sparked by the fact that game theory enables us to make explicit the design problem posed by the long-term benefit of cooperation and the immediate cost in individual fitness of doing so.

In economics, game theory assumes that the competitors in the game are rational agents. Of course, evolutionary game theory can’t assume that individual animals are rational agents—it doesn’t even assume humans are. Nor does evolutionary game theory assume that animals’ behavior is genetically hardwired. It requires only that behavior respond to environmental filtration. If hardwired, then natural selection keeps selecting for more and more optimal behavior by filtering the genes that hardwire the behavior.

If the behavior is learned, the learning device is hardwired into the animal’s brain. It filters for the fittest strategic behaviors by operant reinforcement, the process B. F. Skinner discovered and named. Operant reinforcement is just natural selection operating over an animal’s lifetime. Behavior is randomly, blindly emitted;