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Cooperation
WHY NOT?
What's it about?
"Cooperation is the architect of creativity throughout evolution, from cells to multicellular creatures to anthills to villages to cities. Without cooperation there can be neither construction nor complexity in evolution."
Martin Nowak, in the book SuperCooperators
DEFINITION
Cooperation means (i) to incur a cost to bestow a benefit on someone or (ii) to work with others towards common goals.
WHERE'S COOPERATION?
Cooperation is everywhere, from unicelular organisms to human society.
WHAT'S THE QUESTION?
Why should one cooperate if there is a chance to avoid the cost of cooperation and freely enjoy the benefits? How to coordinate actions to achive common goals?
Evolutionary game theory
It's a theoretical framework to study the evolution of phenotypes in a population where the fitness of individuals depends on the frequency of the different phenotypes in the population.
Population of cooperators and defectors
Cooperators incur a cost to bestow a benefit on others. Costs and benefits are translated as reproductive rate. Thus, how do cooperators survive the competition against defectors? The answer for most species lies in the realm of kin selection. But, for humans, things get more complicated, since we largely cooperate with non-kin.
What I do
I'm a physicist who investigates how cooperation evolves in populations. Statistical physics provides useful tools to study many-particle systems. Cooperation is a collective phenomenon arising out of simple individual-level interactions. Through the lens of computer simulations, analytical approximations, behavioral experiments and database analysis, I investigate the emergence of cooperation in populations. Cooperation is what I like to investigate the most, but generally speaking, I work with models in evolutionary game theory.
Publications
I usually publish in physics journals in the sections for complex systems and network. Have a look at my publications at Google Scholar.