Evolutionarily Stable Strategy - History

History

Evolutionarily stable strategies were defined and introduced by John Maynard Smith and George R. Price in a 1973 Nature paper. Such was the time taken in peer-reviewing the paper for Nature that this was preceded by a 1972 essay by Maynard Smith in a book of essays titled On Evolution. The 1972 essay is sometimes cited instead of the 1973 paper, but university libraries are much more likely to have copies of Nature. Papers in Nature are usually short; in 1974, Maynard Smith published a longer paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Maynard Smith explains further in his 1982 book Evolution and the Theory of Games. Sometimes these are cited instead. In fact, the ESS has become so central to game theory that often no citation is given, as the reader is assumed to be familiar with it.

Maynard Smith mathematically formalised a verbal argument made by Price, which he read while peer-reviewing Price's paper. When Maynard Smith realized that the somewhat disorganised Price was not ready to revise his article for publication, he offered to add Price as co-author.

The concept was derived from R. H. MacArthur and W. D. Hamilton's work on sex ratios, derived from Fisher's principle, especially Hamilton's (1967) concept of an unbeatable strategy. Maynard Smith was jointly awarded the 1999 Crafoord Prize for his development of the concept of evolutionarily stable strategies and the application of game theory to the evolution of behaviour.

Uses of ESS:

• The ESS was a major element used to analyze evolution in Richard Dawkins' bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
• The ESS was first used in the social sciences by Robert Axelrod in his 1984 book The Evolution of Cooperation. Since then, it has been widely used in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, philosophy, and political science.
• In the social sciences, the primary interest is not in an ESS as the end of biological evolution, but as an end point in cultural evolution or individual learning.
• In evolutionary psychology, ESS is used primarily as a model for human biological evolution.