I’m procrastinating on reading Perko’s Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems by reading the intro chapter of Nowak’s Evolutionary Dynamics. It says:
Chapter 5 is dedicated to the best game in town, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The cooperation of reproducing entities is essential for evolutionary progress. Genes cooperate to form a genome. Cells cooperate to produce multicellular organisms. Individuals cooperate to form groups and societies. The emergence of human culture is a cooperative enterprise. The very problem of how to obtain cooperation by natural selection is described by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the absence of any other assumption, natural selection favors defectors over cooperators. Cooperation has a chance, however, if there are repeated interactions between the same two individuals. We will encounter the strategy Tit-for-tat, which is defeated first by Generous Tit-for-tat and then by Win-stay, lose-shift.
So, like, I’m pretty sure I’ve uttered the middle of this paragraph nearly verbatim. ”Look at all these different forms of cooperation that have evolved at different levels of organization! Isn’t that amazing?” And then I have concluded with “and I have no idea how cooperation managed to evolve”. So suffice it to say that I’m really excited to read Chapter 5.