The Power Of Nice.

Nice guys finish first, shouldn’t it be “nice guys finish last”(202)? as I read chapter 12 I was facinated with the game prisoners dilema and how Dawkins applies it to animals and plants. The game is playes like this:
There is a banker who gives out the winnings to the two players. Each player has two cars, one labeled cooperate and the other defect. In order to play each player chooses one card and plays it face down on the table. The trick here is that our winnings depend not only in the card we choose but on the other players card. Since there are four card there are four possible outcomes.
Both players play cooperate: the banker pays each 300$
Both players play defect: the bankr fines both playes for 10$
Player A plays cooperate player B plays defect: the banker fines player A 100$ and pays player B 500$.
The fourth outcome is the other way around: the banker fines player B 100$ and pays player A 500$.
The conclusion we can get from this is that “regardless of which card you play,my bets move is always defect”(205)
You know what move you are going to make but you don’t know the move of the other player. When it comes to computers you can program them to play with a strict strategy. Using this examples is how Dawkins explains how nice guys finish first. Lets compare two strategies: the first one, is tit for tat this ine starts by cooperating and then copies the prior move of the other player. The other strategy is Naïve prober, this one “is basically identical to tit for tat except that , once in a while, say on a random one in ten moves it throw sin a gratuitous defectation and claims the high tempation score”(210) In a competion tita for tat will be the startegy that wins because it is a “nice” strategy but throughout the game you would think the other strategy the evil one would win. This happens almost with every situation in life, for example the bully. He is the strong one, the one everone fears so people do what he wants. But eventually he stops being the strong one when someone stands uo to him and ends up alone with no friends, therefor he looses.
A situation similar to this one occurs in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth want to kill the king, Duncan, in this case they are seen as the bad ones. As I said before they start of winning because they kill him and get want they want, the throne. This is how I thought things were, nice guys finishing last and the bad guy succeding, but as this chapter made me realize things are not like this, not even in Macbeth because soon after they had killed the king Lady Macbeth kills herself and Macbeth is also killed so the glory of the bad did not last long. I know can believe Dawkins idea that “even with selfish genes at the helm nice guys can finish first”(233)