So reading though ‘Liars and Outliers’ , and everything was going great until about page 45.  Then Bruce Schneider seems to take a logical leap simply attributing all logical behavior by humans to a system called ‘Deacon’s paradox.’  This struck me as the ‘game theory’ (aka: jump the shark) moment of the book.  Lets look closer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/symbolicspecies.htm

He talks about fossil evidence being the smoking gun.  He’s quite correct both that it can’t be extracted, and that if we could take a molecular look at prehistoric man’s brain we could compare and understand.

“Even though neural science has pried ever deeper into the mysteries of brain function, we still lack a theory of global brain functions.”

Not anymore.  With the psychopath as the prehistoric predecessor to empathic humans we can do a molecule to molecule analysis.  We just haven’t.

This seems to be Deacon’s book discussing the to complex to describe in less than ten chapter theory.   Not all the reviews are great.  Rejecting further analysis on the chance that it’s a tar pit.  Even if the theory is that complicated, the predictions should describable in mere paragraphs.

http://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Nature-Mind-Emerged-Matter/dp/0393049914

The bottom line is this.  It’s hard to take any theory seriously that doesn’t account for at least two separate hardwired social strategies into account.  In the case of ancient breed, irrational trust, and selfish logic.