Evolutionary Game Theory and the origin of life – Molecules
Link: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/life’s-origin-might-illustrate-power-game-theory
Game theory, primarily developed by John con Neumann and his fellow economist Oskar Morgenstern in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, found applications in various other fields of research due to its universality. Tom Siegfried, in his article Life’s origin might illustrate the power of game theory, demonstrates how the idea of game theory could find application in the biological field, even further down beneath the source and origin of life. His explanation and argument intersects the evolutionary game theory discussed in class.
Analogous to the instances from textbook, Siegfried breaks down his biological applications into two parts. First in which animals choose different strategies, or skills, that they use to hunt prey or acquire necessary nutrition. Second, in which animals inadvertently evolve following the ‘evolutionary stable strategy’ for the sake of survival. The second part is highly more stressed due to its deeper and more direct relationship to the application of game theory on the origin of life. Since, according to Katrin Bohl, “cognitive and rational capabilities are no prerequisites of players in gam-theoretical models,” biological molecules also fall into the boundaries of entities under evolutionary game theory. Just like people want to maximize what they could get out of a certain amount of activity, biological molecules do thrive to maximize their energetic stability. In trying to reach energetic stability, molecules of different characteristics die or survive due to natural selection. In this case, their properties and characteristics are considered strategies and the amount of energetic stability gained after matching with the environment or the interacting property of proteins are payoffs. Molecules’ rigidity and flexibility, genes’ characteristics may determine whether a certain molecule, cell, or virus could survive depending on how much payoff they will be able to generate in a certain environment. Biological molecules with higher payoffs will achieve more stable energetic state and thus will have more possibility of surviving. The aspects of these phenomena are very universal in that most of living beings could fall in as examples. Since all life forms are derived from cells in the beginning, researching the origin of life might actually illustrate the power of evolutionary game theory because the application of idea has been existent ever since.