Related papers: Social Evolution: New Horizons
Continuously changing environments have a paramount role in the evolution of cooperative behavior. Previous works have shown that the transitions among different games, as the feedback between behaviors and environments, can promote…
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
Evolutionary game theory offers a general framework to study how behaviors evolve by social learning in a population. This body of theory can accommodate a range of social dilemmas, or games, as well as real-world complexities such as…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Exploiting others is beneficial individually but it could also be detrimental globally. The reverse is also true: a higher cooperation level may change the environment in a way that is beneficial for all competitors. To explore the possible…
Networks built to model real world phenomena are characeterised by some properties that have attracted the attention of the scientific community: (i) they are organised according to community structure and (ii) their structure evolves with…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
A binary game is introduced and analysed. N players have to choose one of the two sides independently and those on the minority side win. Players uses a finite set of ad hoc strategies to make their decision, based on the past record. The…
We investigate two paradigms for studying the evolution of cooperation--Prisoner's Dilemma and Snowdrift game in an online friendship network obtained from a social networking site. We demonstrate that such social network has small-world…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
Cooperation is a key driver of human social progress. Studies of the evolution of cooperation typically assume a deterministic outcome for social interactions. But in real-world social interactions, interaction outcomes are often subject to…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Models of cooperation grounded on social networks and on the ability of individuals to choose actions and partners aim to describe human social behavior. Extensive computer simulations of these models give important insight in the social…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
The evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies remains a challenging issue across disciplines. It is an important subject also in the evolutionary game theory to research how cooperation arises. The…
Repeated interaction between individuals is the main mechanism for maintaining cooperation in social dilemma situations. Variants of tit-for-tat (repeating the previous action of the opponent) and the win-stay lose-shift strategy are known…
Disentangling the mechanisms underlying the social network evolution is one of social science's unsolved puzzles. Preferential attachment is a powerful mechanism explaining social network dynamics, yet not able to explain all scaling-laws…