ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Game theory in biology: 50 years and onwards.
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 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Ecological inheritance facilitates the coexistence of environmental helpers and free riders.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Parental control: ecology drives plasticity in parental response to offspring signals.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology · 2025Article
- Mutualism and division of labour: a mutual expansion of concepts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Time-Dependent Strategies in Repeated Asymmetric Public Goods Games.Dynamic games and applications · 2025Article
- Connecting and integrating cooperation within and between species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Social bond dynamics and the evolution of helping.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Modelling the emergence of synchrony from decentralized rhythmic interactions in animal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The early rise and spread of evolutionary game theory: perspectives based on recollections of early workers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Game theory in biology gained prominence 50 years ago, when Maynard Smith & Price formulated the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). Their aim was to explain why conflicts between animals of the same species usually are of a 'limited war' type, not causing serious injury. They emphasized that game theory is an alternative to previous ideas about group selection, which were used by ethologists to explain limited aggression. Subsequently, the ESS concept was applied to many phenomena with frequency dependence in the evolutionary success of strategies, including sex allocation, alternative mating types, contest behaviour and signalling, cooperation, and parental care. Both the analyses of signalling and cooperation were inspired by similar problems in economics and attracted much attention in biology. Here we give a perspective on which of the ambitions in the field have been achieved, with a focus on contest behaviour and cooperation. We evaluate whether the game-theoretical study of the evolution of cooperation has measured up to expectations in explaining the behaviour of non-human animals. We also point to potentially fruitful directions for the field, and emphasize the importance of incorporating realistic behavioural mechanisms into models. 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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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.