evolutionary stability
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Evolution plays an important though underutilized role in medicine. Evolution guides how our bodies respond to various treatments, how pathogens will respond to treatments, and how pathogens' responses will change over time. Pathogens oftentimes will evolve to an intermediate level of virulence where they become strong enough to infect a host and reproduce, but not so strong as to kill the host before it can spread the pathogen.
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Breeding strategies differ both among males and females of the same species as well as among different species. The difference in breeding strategies among members of the same species can usually be linked to frequency dependence. If the species is at evolutionary equilibrium, the relative fitnesses of these different strategies will be identical. Differing strategies have been found at the level of the gamete as well as at the level of di...more
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One can look at biodiversity from several perspectives. An ecological point of view tries to determine how necessary diversity is for an ecosystem to function. An economic point of view tries to capture the value of the "services" nature provides for mankind. An evolutionary point of view shows how artificial the human "right" to dominance is. Finally, a personal point of view captures the emotional basis for the values that humans place o...more
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The economic concept of game theory can be readily applied to evolution and behavior. By analyzing encounters between organisms as a mathematical "game," important information such as fitness payoffs and the proportions of "strategies" played by each group within a population can be inferred. While oftentimes these games are too simplified to apply directly to actual examples in nature, they are still useful models that help convey importa...more
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The fossil record holds a lot of evolutionary information that can't be seen on shorter time scales, although the more recent fossil record is more complete. Among other things, the fossil record demonstrates that extinctions can open up ecological space for new speciation and radiation, and that life forms tend to begin small and evolve to be bigger over time.
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Life history covers three main classes of traits in organisms: age and size at maturity, number and size of offspring, and lifespan and reproductive investment. Organisms must make tradeoffs among these traits that typically cause them to come to evolutionary equilibrium at intermediate values. Life history traits are evolutionary solutions to the ecological problems of the risk of mortality and the acquisition of food, and they are expres...more
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There is a distinct possibility that humans are currently part way through an evolutionary transition between individuals and groups. The conflict between these two units of selection and levels of organization, between biology and culture, may explain some of the tensions in modern human life. Examples of selfishness and altruism exemplify how these types of selection act on humans.
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We discuss evolution and game theory, and introduce the concept of evolutionary stability. We ask what kinds of strategies are evolutionarily stable, and how this idea from biology relates to concepts from economics like domination and Nash equilibrium.
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We apply the idea of evolutionary stability to consider the evolution of social conventions. Then we consider games that involve aggressive (Hawk) and passive (Dove) strategies, finding that sometimes, evolutionary populations are mixed. We discuss how such games can help us to predict how behavior might vary across settings. Finally, we consider a game in which there is no evolutionary stable population and discuss an example from nature.
