Evolutionary dynamics

Often, the selfish and strong are believed to be favored by natural selection, even though cooperative and fair interactions thrive at all levels of organization in living systems. This project tackles this paradox in the context of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), having kin-selection, direct and indirect reciprocity as conceptual starting points. Contrary to what is usual, models will also take into account the intricate ties of modern social networks and its topological evolution.

In spite of its relevance, understanding the evolution of cooperation remains one of the most fundamental challenges to date, tackled by scientists from fields as diverse as anthropology, biology, sociology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, mathematics, physics, etc., who often adopt EGT as a common mathematical framework. Hence, students who choose this proposal should be strongly interested in interdisciplinary research.

Multiple proposals are available for highly motivated students.

Public goods correspond to resources which are used simultaneously by multiple players. From a game theoretical perspective, such resources are modeled as the accumulation of contributions given by N players. Yet, in many situations, the resource evolves through its own dynamics. The aim is here to investigate such games and to examine the conditions for the evolution of cooperation.

In cultural evolution, individuals learn from environmental cues and from the success of other agents in the environment. Learning from others (SL) is considered to less costly than learning everything yourself (IL). As such, one can wonder under which conditions one should then actually learn new things. In this project we will investigate the question how the ability to innovate evolves in a competitive environment.

While different mechanisms may have increased the amount of cooperation in our society, no attention has been given to the more negative forms of cooperation in which the help is biased towards or restricted to members of the same social group. Such behaviour is called parochialism and may lead in the worst case to a situation where individuals are even prepared to act in a hostile manner towards outsiders. Based on the literature, we distinguish between a harmless – a passive attitude towards outsiders –and harmful – truly hostile towards outsiders – form of this behaviour. Only when there is a significant amount of the latter form of parochialism, can there be large-scale conflict like war. We will use game theoretical modelling to examine these forms of cooperation and look for conditions that avoid large scale conflict.

If you are interested in this subject, contact Prof. Tom Lenaerts.