Game Theory and The Origin of Life
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/life%E2%80%99s-origin-might-illustrate-power-game-theory
As mentioned in class, Game Theory has several applications, spanning from international relations to poker. In the 1970s, George Price and John Maynard Smith demonstrated that game theory and nash equilibrium could even be applied to biology, specifically the notion of competition among species in the survival of the fittest. Smith and Price asserted that animals, just like humans, can choose different strategies to optimize their chances of survival. For most animals, the strategies represent behaviors that the animals often engage in rather than choices they deliberately make. For instance, a hawk may engage in an aggressive strategy while a dove might employ a passive strategy simply because this is how these two types of birds commonly behave. Nash equilibrium, or an evolutionary stable strategy, is obtained within a population if no benefit is offered to the next animal for adopting an alternative strategy.
As an extension of Smith and Price’s work, scientists further applied game theory and Nash equilibrium to biological molecules. Different chemical reactions can be seen as the strategies certain molecules may employ to maximize energetic stability. This idea can even be seen in the origins of life, specifically in regards to the self-assembling nature of ribozymes, RNA molecules capable of enzymatic activity. Cooperative ribozymes are those that assist in the assembly of other ribozymes, leading to a complex network that can eventually produce life. ‘Selfish’ ribozymes, on the other hand, replicate only themselves. The origin of life can be attributed to the fact that the cooperative strategy out-competed the selfish strategy in producing more prebiological diversity. Therefore, this example demonstrates that beyond competition among species in biology, game theory and Nash equilibrium can also apply to molecules involved in the emergence of life.