Emily Heydon

To date, most analyses of evolutionary games have assumed that evolution is a unidirectional process: Natural selection is represented in the form of payoffs, and organisms must either adapt to the selective pressures in play, or die. Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus that organisms frequently engage in niche-constructing behaviors that alter the selective pressures they are subject to. Niche-constructing behaviors can be modeled game-theoretically, as behaviors that impact payoffs (and therefore relative fitness). I demonstrate that such behaviors enable cooperation to emerge from the prisoner’s dilemma and argue that niche construction likely impacts the evolutionary dynamics of other games.

Forber and Smead (2014) analyze how increasing the fitness benefits associated with prosocial behavior can increase the fitness of spiteful individuals relative to their prosocial counterparts, so that selection favors spite over prosociality. This poses a problem for the evolution of prosocial behavior: As the benefits of prosocial behavior increase, it becomes more likely that spite, not prosocial behavior, will evolve in any given population. In this article, I develop two game-theoretic models that, taken together, illustrate how synergistic costs and benefits may provide partial solutions to Forber and Smead’s paradox.