Evolutionary Game Theory

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Evolutionary game theory is a new way of looking at the behaviour of animals and other organisms. It suggests that in games with incomplete information, it's best to mix up your strategies. M so this area really started, am taking off in biology, in large part, due to the work of john maynard smith,. The idea was something like this, o kwe have these games. They're representing strategic senarios mostly. But most of them we know aren't sitting down and engaging in a rational deliberation. Instead, a lot of their behaviours have evolved.

You can’t always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and the evolution of other animals over time, are shaped by competition for scarce resources of various kinds. Game theory provides a natural framework for understanding strategies and behaviors in these competitive settings, and thus provides a lens with which to analyze evolution and human behavior, up to and including why racial or gender groups are consistently discriminated against in society. Cailin O’Connor is the author or two recent books on these issues: Games in the Philosophy of Biology and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.

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Cailin O’Connor received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UCI. Her works involves questions in the philosophy of biology and behavioral science, game theory, agent-based modeling, social epistemology, decision theory, rational choice, and the spread of misinformation.

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