How does Evolutionary Game Theory explain?

Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2005

1982

Evolutionary Game Theory - V. Zeigler-Hill, T. K. Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 2019

Psychological Inquiry, 2000

Lloyd and Feldman's (this issue) continuing commentary on our recent target article and rejoinder focuses on two overarching issues. First, Lloyd and Feldman claim that our description of the core metatheoretical assumptions of modern evolutionary theory overemphasizes the role of inclusive fitness (i.e., the so-called selfish gene approach) at the expense of underemphasizing important alternative approaches (e.g., multilevel selection models, gene-culture coevolution models). Second, Lloyd and Feldman criticize some of the methods and assumptions that ostensibly characterize the evolutionary psychology research program. These criticisms concern the conceptualization of organisms as inclusive fitness maximizers, the soundness of the epistemology of evolutionary psychology, the modularity of psychological mechanisms, and the universality of psychological mechanisms. In the first part of this rejoinder, we acknowledge that different schools of thought exist regarding the plausibility and importance of various metatheoretical assumptions in human evolutionary psychology. We argue that to date, however, only the gene-centered adaptationist program (consistent with inclusive fitness theory) has demonstrated scientific progressivity by generating a coherent, integrated body of new knowledge and explaining away several apparent anomalies. In the second part of this rejoinder, we discuss several misunderstandings that underlie Lloyd and Feldman's criticisms of human evolutionary psychology.

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 1997

John Maynard Smith is the person most responsible for the use of game theory in evolutionary biology, having introduced and developed its major concepts, and later surveyed its uses. In this paper I look at some rhetorical work done by Maynard Smith and his co-author G.R. Price to make game theory a standard and common modelling tool for the evolutionary study of behavior. The original presentation of the ideas-in a 1973 Nature article-is frequently cited but almost certainly rarely read. It took reformulation of the approach to create a usable model and an object of study. Perhaps paradoxically, the new model dealt with more abstract objects than did its predecessor, but because of that a better case could be made for its realism. The particular strategy of abstraction allowed game theoretic modelling to gain a certain measure of autonomy from empirical problems, and thus to flourish.

Biology & Philosophy, 2016

The 'phenotypic gambit,' the assumption that we can ignore genetics and look at the fitness of phenotypes to determine the expected evolutionary dynamics of a population, is often used in evolutionary game theory. However, as this paper will show, an overlooked genotype to phenotype map can qualitatively affect evolution in ways the phenotypic approach cannot predict or explain. This gives us reason to believe that, even in the long-term, correspondences between phenotypic predictions and dynamical outcomes are not robust for all plausible assumptions regarding the underlying genetics of traits. This paper shows important ways in which the phenotypic gambit can fail and how to proceed with evolutionary game theoretic modeling when it does.

Based upon evolutionary game theory, philosopher of science Brian Skyrms developed certain simulationbased models to explain cultural phenomena for which alternate theories failed to offer plausible explanations. This article aims to examine the preceding claim by unpacking the logical structure of the Skyrmsian theory. Because the mathematical model employed by Skyrms is challenged by the author, the methodology of this study is analytical rather than mathematical simulation. The Skyrmsian approach is purely phenotypic rather than genotypic. Further, it is evolutionary generalist and thus omits the psychological mechanisms or the evolutionary histories from which humans emerge. To compensate for the lack of detail in describing psychological mechanisms, mathematical properties such as robustness are introduced in the Skyrmsian approach. This article illustrates how omitting genotypic factors and the interlocking attributes of phenotypic components might pull the Skyrmsian model away from reality. As a model of force that emphasizes the detail of psychological drives (forces), evolutionary psychology can play a vital role in defining input variables for the Skyrmsian approach, while the latter can function as an evaluation tool to assess the explanatory power of proposed models in terms of robustness. In the era of big data, it is possible for both evolutionary game theorists and evolutionary psychologists to extract robust behavioral patterns and social dynamics from voluminous data.

Biology and Philosophy

We critically examine a number of aspects of Grafen’s ‘formal Darwinism’ project. We argue that Grafen’s ‘selection-optimality’ links do not quite succeed in vindicating the working assumption made by behavioural ecologists and others—that selection will lead organisms to exhibit adaptive behaviour—since these links hold true even in the presence of strong genetic and developmental constraints. However we suggest that the selection-optimality links can profitably be viewed as constituting an axiomatic theory of fitness. Finally, we compare Grafen’s project with Fisher’s ‘fundamental theorem of natural selection’, and we speculate about whether Grafen’s results can be extended to a game-theoretic setting

Biology & Philosophy, 2000

Stephen Jay Gould is rightly remembered for many different kinds of contributions to our intellectual life. I focus on his criticisms of uses of evolutionary ideas to defend inegalitarian doctrines and on his attempts to expand the framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I argue that his important successes in the former sphere are applications of the idea of local critique, grounded in careful attention to the details of the inegalitarian proposals. As he became more concerned with the second project, Gould was inclined to suggest that the abuses of evolutionary ideas rested on an insufficiently expanded Darwinism. I suggest that what is valuable in Gould's contribution to general evolutionary theory is the original claim about punctuated equilibrium (advanced, with Niles Eldredge in1972), and the careful defense of that claim through the accumulation of paleontological evidence. I try to show that the more ambitious program of a hierarchical expansion of neo-Darwinism is misguided, and that the endeavor to go beyond local critique fails.

Biology and Philosophy, 1991

Our approach to explicating the concept of fitness is to examine the parameters and variables that appear in models used in population biology, how they are interpreted, and what general relationships exist among them. When these models are examined, three general kinds of variables or parameters can be distinguished: rates of increase of genotypes, parameters representing the environment and heritable properties of genotypes. Beginning with R.A. Fisher, the concept of fitness refers to a genotype's rate of increase (F-fitness), which is the bottom line in evolution. As mentioned in our paper, there are other fitness concepts, for example, expected reproductive success, that appear in the models. However, since these concepts are intervening functions used in the calculation of F-fitness we do not belabor them. Maynard Smith notes that F-fitness is not the measure of Darwinian fitness w as expected number of progeny per individual. The terminology can be confusing here, but the bottom line fitness of a genotype which determines expected gene frequency change is F-fitness, which includes the rate of increase due to the genetic system. Why is there a need for general explication of the concept "fitness"? One such need arises from the tortuous discussions of the purported tautology problem by critics of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionists have sometimes been goaded into giving responses which deepen rather than alleviate the confusion. Many evolutionists, however, feel that there is nothing wrong with their actual use of the concept "fitness" (Darwinian fitness, selection coefficients) in their models. Why then should they bother with philosophical analyses of the "real meaning" of 'fitness'? Aside from the notorious tautology challenge there are complexities in interpreting fitness, adaptedness and related concepts due both to ambiguities among different uses of the terms and to subtleties concerning evolutionary explanation. We want some understanding of what various models of evolution