Monkeys and money.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics - Interview

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Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American, and the author of, most recently, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books). Shermer's new book seeks to explain "how evolution shaped the modern economy and why people are so irrational about money."

A Ph.D. in the history of science and an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, Shermer lives and works in Southern California. His previous books include Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, and Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

In January, Shermer sat down with reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie to talk about the intersection between evolution and capitalism, trust in a globalized world, and his "Google theory of peace." What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation; video of the interview is online at reason.tv.

Q: What's the basic idea behind The Mind of the Market?

A: That trade is the best thing we can do to break clown the natural animosities between groups. For trade to work, two individuals have to have a certain amount of trust. We know from game theory that once trust breaks down, subjects begin to defect rather than cooperate. What does it take for them to cooperate? Trust. What does trust take? Trust takes a n umber of exchanges in which there are no defections.

Q: You've called this a "consciousness-raising book."

A: I'm trying to convince my liberal friends that this evolution stuff they're already completely comfortable with really applies to the market. That they can accept free market economics as yet another one of these bottom-up self-organizing systems. And I'm trying to convince my conservative friends who already like free market economics that evolution is an OK thing.

I have very little doubt that it will be much harder to convince liberals. I think the cultural embeddedness of the anti-capitalistic mentality on the...