What Is “The Evolution of Cooperation“?

The semantics of stability: evolutionarily stable strategy in biology and economics literature

“…Originally coined by Maynard Smith and Price, the term evolutionarily stable strategy has been adopted by a broad range of disciplines across the spectrum of natural and social sciences (Piel, 2019(Piel, , 2020Leimar and McNamara, 2023). ESS, a subset of Nash equilibrium (NE; Apaloo et al, 2015), states that if a population adopts a strategy in a given environment, it cannot be invaded by an alternative strategy that is initially very rare (Nakamaru, 2023, Chapter 1). As described by Bishop and Cannings (1976), in a population where most individuals use a strategy p against a mutant strategy q, ∀ q, q ≠ p, for p to be an ESS, for every possible q, a) the average pay-off, in terms of inclusive fitness, the ultimate utility (Levin and Grafen, 2019), of using strategy p against itself is greater than the pay-off of q against p, E(p, p) > E(q, p); or b) If the pay-off of p against p is equal to the pay-off of q against p, i.e., E(p, p) = E(q, p), then p must have a higher pay-off against q than q does against itself, E(p, q) > E(q, q).…”