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when our science hats are on. Even philosophy, in the Western tradition, leaves
revelation aside. A practical consideration is that debates of how God is likely to be
motivated to intercede have tended to find little consensus or traction. Science gets
some.
I tipped my hand on my own views in Chapter 1. As chairman of the Leakey
Foundation for more than 40 years, I pretty clearly buy evolution theory and
unguided natural casualty as working assumptions. But ] invite those who don’t to
read further before deciding that we will disagree on conclusions. If I foresaw a
conflict with the devout, which I don’t, I would feel obligated to warn them now. I'll
bring this up again as we go along.
My next few axioms, lumped together, are a mortal and reproducing population
which competes, cooperates and freelances to act on convergent predictions. It acts
to satisfy convergent tastes in a world of limited resources. | will model the
population as human, although other species would do insofar as my axioms hold
for them. “Convergent” means non-identical from individual to individual or place to
place or moment to moment, but converging to norms with increasing scale in space
and time. Predictions converge to outcomes as well as to one another.
The point is that tastes and predictions must be convergent enough for markets to
form and hold. A market, as Becker knew, is where anyone makes any choice among
alternatives. A literal market is where a choice leaves a quantitative record. Markets
cannot form and hold if we cannot predict where to find them and what they supply
and when they are open. They cannot form and hold without some consensus that
what we predict they will offer includes something we want. Clothing stores can
work because our sizes and shapes fall mostly within standard ranges. Their
business would be in trouble if we did not agree in number and rough placement of
arms and legs and head. Restaurants can work because we can find what we want
on a finite menu. Most crucially, clothing stores and restaurants cannot hold unless
there is consensus on what their wares are worth in return. All this convergence
Chapter 3: Foundations
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