[FRIAM] Axelrod's books

[Jochen Fromm]

I have read the book "Harnessing Complexity" as well, and was a 
bit disappointed. It is small and contains no interesting models.
IMHO his classic books about "The Evolution of Cooperation"
and "The Complexity of Cooperation" are much better. As you know, the
first is about the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and in the second
he presents the "Dissemination Model" which explains the emergence 
of culture through local convergence and global polarization, and 
his "Tribute Model" (for "building political actors") which captures 
some of the essential properties of power and tries to explain 
the origin of nations and empires. His agent based models are simple, 
but that's their beauty. The complexity should be in the results, not 
in the model itself.

-J.


-----Original Message-----
From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf
Of Michael Agar
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 8:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unified Theory

[...] I'm just reading Axelrod and Cohen's Harnessing  
Complexity, a book that means to introduce a broader audience who are  
thinking about organizations to complexity science. They organize the  
book in sections on variation, interaction and selection and do a  
nice job of introducing some of the differences that have to be  
included in a social and cultural millieu.