But how does this reflect in any way on on-line poker? Presumably much of the skill is reading cues from other people's behaviour - that behaviour, of course, includes their actual actions within the game, but it's also other things, like body language and what-not. Arguing that real-life poker isn't random (duh) and therefore on-line poker isn't random is a bit like arguing that real-life fencing isn't random and therefore dice-based D&D battles aren't random...

I've often been disappointed with how little understanding of evolutionary theory one finds in "evolutionary" accounts of institutional change. My dissertation, which I am currently writing, attempts among other things to make use of exactly this sort of evolutionary-path-dependency thinking as applied to processes of democratization, with ideas acting in the role of random mutations. And if you mentioned Dawkins, I still hope to one day apply his ideas of memetics to political science topic. (I even have a title ready: "democratic contagion: memetic or mimetic?")

What about Battlestar Galactica? I mean, the centre of that show was the internal politics!