Like other social animals, humans play adaptively important games, and current evolutionary theory predicts special-purpose, domain-specific cognitive mechanisms for playing such games. We offer a functional analysis of the information requirements for successfully playing one important social game, the “hawk-dove” conflict-of-interest game, developing new graphic conventions for doing so. In particular, we address the orders of recognition necessary for successfully playing such games, showing that there are adaptive advantages of capacities for first, second, third, and fourth such orders, but no more. We suggest that first-order recognition is not only the most basic in analytic terms but is likely to have been the first to evolve, with subsequent orders added later in evolution.

The hijacking and purposeful crashing of airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prompts questions about why the passengers and crew of those airplanes did not act to prevent these attacks, as did at least some passengers on a hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. We argue, first, that humans have an evolved cognitive bias that leads to the expectation that antagonists hope to survive conflict and, second, that highly credible information to the contrary is needed to overcome this bias. Absent such information, the passengers on at least two airplanes incorrectly interpreted the game being played as a hawk-dove version of a conflict-of-interest game, when it was actually a “suicidal terrorism” variant of that family. Given that other terrorists may have been in the air and ready to act, the airlines' policy of not informing passengers about such events could have risked disabling them from reacting forcefully when force alone was advisable.

Economic considerations typically have led societies to develop rather than to preserve wild and natural places. Accordingly, preservationists traditionally have based arguments for protecting nature on its intrinsic rather than instrumental worth. These traditional arguments rest on aesthetic, moral, and spiritual rather than on economic values. Today, though, many environmentalists point to the preservation of nature's “services” as the reason to protect ecosystems from conscious manipulation or careless degradation. Many cite a decision by New York City to spend over $1 billion to purchase land in the Catskills watershed to secure or restore the capacity of the natural ecosystem to purify the City's water supply. This essay questions the validity of this example and, in turn, the generalizability of the thesis it has widely been thought to support.

Civil violence is a complex and often horrific phenomenon whose characteristics have varied by era, setting, and circumstance. Its objective analysis has rarely been feasible at spatial and temporal scales great enough and resolutions fine enough to reveal patterns useful in prevention, intervention, or adjudication. An extraordinary data set simultaneously meeting scale and resolution criteria was collected during conflict in Guatemala from 1977 through 1986. Reported here is its spatial-temporal analysis; reported as well is a putatively novel method for estimating power-law exponents from aggregate data. Analysis showed that the relationship between ethnic mix and killing was smooth yet highly nonlinear, that the temporal texture of killings was rough, and that the distribution of killing-event sizes was dichotomous, with nongenocidal and genocidal conflict periods displaying Zipf and non-Zipf distributions, respectively. These results add statistical support to claims that the Guatemalan military operated under at least two directives with respect to killing and that one of these effected a genocidal campaign against an indigenous people, the Mayans. Implications for group-behavioral modeling, conflict prevention, peace-keeping intervention, human-rights monitoring, and transitional justice are noted.

With this edition we introduce the Harrison Symposium as a regular feature of Politics and the Life Sciences, The Symposium will focus on current, debates, developments, and controversies in the domain of global governance, globalization, and the life sciences.

The Symposium is a product of the University of Maryland's Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda. The Harrison Program's mission is to promote research, teaching, and public dialogue on issues related to ecological security, long-term sustainability, energy and environmental policy, and global governance. Symposium editors are Dennis Pirages, the Horace Harrison Professor of International Environmental Politics at the University of Maryland and Ken Conca, Harrison Program director. We aim for the Symposia to be ongoing discussions; readers are encouraged to submit comments, reactions and suggestions for future Symposia to the editors.

In mid-2000, Medha Patkar, a leader of one of the best-known social movements in India, and Goran Lindahl, the Chief Executive Officer of one of the world's largest engineering firms, participated in a meeting together in Cape Town. The two came from different worlds. Patkar was weak from undertaking a hunger strike to protest a dam on the Narmada River in western India. Lindahl arrived at the last minute on his private jet. Before their meeting, Patkar animatedly described the recent protests, showed Lindahl pictures of the villagers, and narrated their experiences.

Business as usual, government as usual, and perhaps even protest as usual are not giving us the progress needed to achieve sustainable development. Let's see if we can't work together to find better paths forward.

The World Commission on Dams marks a moment of real progress in the large-dams controversy. It does so in at least two ways: as a statement of the norms that should govern dam-related decision-making and as a process of dialogue between dam proponents and critics. Whether this progress translates into consistently better dam-related decisionmaking is a question that remains to be answered. Also unanswered is the larger question of whether the WCD experience will prove to be a replicable model for other environment-development controversies. The Commission emerged from a curious situation in which both dam builders and dam critics felt stymied in their ability to achieve their aims, and in which both saw opportunities in the idea of stakeholder dialogue. Such windows of opportunity may prove rare. The skillful leadership and interpersonal dynamics among the commissioners that helped forge a consensus document may be difficult to reproduce.