The Evolution Of Cooperation

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

"This book has information for military theorists, biologists exploring gene regulation, antitrust policy-makers, and Miss Manners. It is a wonderfully clear explanation of how almost any two entities, interacting over time, develop a mutualism more profitable than greed." -- Amazon review

This should however be balanced with an understanding of how EvolutionarilyStableStrategies nonetheless allows for PopulationNiches within a species for different strategies, which has implications just as broad.

Very true, importantly true. The classic "TheSelfishGene" discusses that very clearly (although the concept was invented earlier by JohnMaynardSmith?). Briefly, cooperation tends to evolve and become the dominant and stable strategy for the majority of a population, but the game-theoretic payoffs mean that there is almost always room for a sub-population of non-cooperators. For any given set of game-theoretic payoffs, there is typically a fixed ratio of cooperators to non-cooperators that is stable over time.

This applies to game-theoretic systems in general (i.e. a vast number of kinds of systems), such as economics, not just to natural and artificial biology.

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