http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-evolutionary/

In this article, found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the topics of evolutionary game theory are discussed. In addition to the Hawk-Dove game that we learned about in class, they use a model with the prisoner’s dilemma. This game is pat of a dynamic model of how the population can evolve over time. Depending on the values of the payoff matrix, the only stable equilibrium can be either for everyone to defect or, on the other hand, for everyone to cooperate. There are also combinations that result in chaotic or undulating systems which never reach one particular equilibrium.

What is especially interesting about this entry of the encyclopedia is how it approaches the notion of evolutionary game theory and social sciences. In particular, the meaning of adaptation in culture is questioned. One major problem arises from the fact that game theory was designed to apply to economic situations with in which rationality can be easily defined as economic utility. Evolutionary game theory, however, attempts to apply this same framework to a qualitatively different situation, namely the selection of irrational actors whose success is based on some loosely defined payoff.

Although some results reached by the study evolutionary game theory are compelling, this does not mean that they are necessarily true. For instance, recall the Schelling model of segregation, in which only a slight preference for homphily was required to lead to clusters of individuals of different characteristics. In this case, we learned that a posteriori reasoning can sometimes be misleading; that sometimes slight individual preferences can lead to unexpected, unintended, or even undesirable macroscopic effects. Another thing that should be taken into account when thinking about evolutionary game theory when applied to human culture can be distilled from the notion of information cascades. An information cascade implies that we, as humans, are influenced by the decisions that we see others make, at least to some extent; network externalities, specifically the impact on one by one’s friends, are also important here. To define a notion of advantageous in this environment would be very difficult, without first determining a primacy to either autonomy or group behavior. This disjunction between evolutionary game theory as a way of modeling the expansion, growth, and death of species, and its applications to human culture are a product of broken assumptions. Only a drastic generalization of evolutionary game theory can overcome this theoretical hurdle, if this theory is to ever explain, or merely to describe, culture.