So the psychopaths, it transpires, have got it only half right. There’s no denying the harshness of existence, the brutal, sawn-off truth that it can, at times, be survival of the fittest out there. But this is not to say that it has to be that way. The meek, it turns out, really do inherit the earth. It’s just that along the way there are always going to be casualties. “Do unto others” has always been sound advice. But now, some two thousand years later, thanks to Robert Axelrod and Anatol Rapoport, we’ve finally got the math to prove it.
