Traders on Wall Street show how institutions can take big risks
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The Gambling Animal
Glenn Harrison and Don Ross (Profile Books)
Insights into animal evolution used to come from studying a creature’s evolutionary relationships to its closest relatives. To lampoon this slightly: we once saw humans as a kind of chimp. Our perspectives widened and, looking across ecosystems, we began to see what drives animals who share the same environment towards similar survival solutions. This is convergent evolution – the process by which, say, if you are a vertebrate living in an aqueous medium, you are almost certainly going to end up looking…