ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
The early rise and spread of evolutionary game theory: perspectives based on recollections of early workers.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Natural disaster emergency response from a public policy perspective: a four-party evolutionary game among government, international organizations, healthcare institutions, and enterprises.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The future of theoretical evolutionary game theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
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Abstract
Though the first attempts to introduce game theory into evolutionary biology failed, new formalism by Maynard Smith and Price in 1973 had almost instant success. We use information supplied by early workers to analyse how and why evolutionary game theory (EGT) spread so rapidly in its earliest years. EGT was a major tool for the rapidly expanding discipline of behavioural ecology in the 1970s; each catalysed the other. The first models were applied to animal contests, and early workers sought to improve their biological reality to compare predictions with observations. Furthermore, it was quickly realized that EGT provided a general evolutionary modelling method; not only was it swiftly applied to diverse phenotypic adaptations in evolutionary biology, it also attracted researchers from other disciplines such as mathematics and economics, for which game theory was first devised. Lastly, we pay attention to exchanges with population geneticists, considering tensions between the two modelling methods, as well as efforts to bring them closer. This article is part of the theme issue 'Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions'.
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