To create More and Better Democrats means to increase cooperation. Punishing cooperation is the declared Republican mission. The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, proposes a theory that says they lose, and recommends particular political strategies to make it happen faster. What we want to know, of course, is when and how they lose, and how those strategies speed things up.
The theory has been proved, in a very specific scientific sense. It fulfills the two essential requirements of a successful scientific theory:
- It has a mathematical content, provable in itself from its definitions and axioms apart from the observable world of human interactions, implying important real-world consequences.
- It has been verified by observation and experiment that the definitions and axioms apply under a wide range of conditions, and in many variations, so that we reliably get the results originally predicted, and more.
Even better than that, the theory can be extended in many other useful ways, with provable properties verified in the real world. We also know some limits of the theory, that is situations in which it cannot be applied usefully.
The content of the theory includes specific advantages that cooperators using certain strategies have over non-cooperators (defectors in the language of the book) in general. I will explain some of the theory, and then show how to apply it to Republicans.