Game Theory and Evolutionary Biology
Game theory is the mathematical analysis for investigating strategies in competitive situations where the outcome for a competitor depends on the choice of action by the other participant(s). It was developed in a groundbreaking book published in 1944 by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern entitled Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This theory is applicable to a wide variety of topics ranging from poker and sports games, to machine learning, auctions and business. It is also useful in examining more unlikely subjects such as evolutionary biology which employs game theory when investigating population trends over the decades. The idea of natural selection in particular can be modeled using the mathematics of game theory.
Natural selection is the idea that the fittest of organisms survive and pass along their genetics to their offspring; but how does this correlate to game theory? Natural selection can be used as an identifier for determining the most effective evolutionary strategies as they are performed by the present surviving fit organisms. These interactions between organisms can be viewed as games with multiple players and there are two types of interaction strategies used by organisms: 1) combative, and 2) cooperative. When a population of organisms has adopted the same strategy for all of its individuals, and the strategy cannot be displaced by any other strategy, it is called an Evolutionary Stable Strategy or ESS. There are two conditions for a strategy to be classified as an ESS: 1) The strategy is more effective than any other individual strategy, and 2) If a new strategy evolves, the original strategy must prove itself to be more effective.
In lecture, Professor Easley and Professor Halpern discussed the classic Hawk and Dove case where the hawks have an aggressive strategy, the doves have a passive one. This example can be applied to evolutionary biology; when a hawk interacts with a dove, the hawk inherits all of the resource, when two doves interact, the resource is evenly divided, and when two hawks interact, the resource is again evenly divided but with an additional cost of energy deriving from the aggression. So if a hawk were to invade a population of doves, the hawk strategy will replace the dove strategy but it will only be labeled as an ESS if the value of the resource is greater than the cost of the aggressive conflict. Clearly game theory is not simply useful in identifying and predicting outcomes in everyday life but can also be applied to more conceptual ideas such as evolutionary biology.
Source: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/game-theory-evolutionary-stable-strategies-and-the-25953132/
Game Theory and Evolutionary Strategies