John Maynard Smith and G. R. Price. "The Logic of Animal Conflict" in Nature vol 246 No. 5427, pp. 15-18, in the issue for November 2 1973). In the original front wrapper, with a blank rear wrapper expertly added. There is one old vertical fold that runs through the issue, and one rubber stamp on the front cover. Other than these notes, a VG copy. Housed in a lovely leather-backed pamphlet case (in Very Fine condition). $500
This is the influential (6,000+ citations) paper about the "hawk-dove game," the introduction of the concept of "Evolutionarily stable strategies."
"Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is the application of game theory to evolving populations in biology. It defines a framework of contests, strategies, and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modeled. It originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price's formalisation of contests, analysed as strategies, and the mathematical criteria that can be used to predict the results of competing strategies [the paper offered]. The first game that Maynard Smith analysed is the classic hawk dove[a] game. It was conceived to analyse Lorenz and Tinbergen's problem, a contest over a shareable resource. The contestants can be either a hawk or a dove. These are two subtypes or morphs of one species with different strategies. The hawk first displays aggression, then escalates into a fight until it either wins or is injured (loses). The dove first displays aggression, but if faced with major escalation runs for safety. If not faced with such escalation, the dove attempts to share the resource."
"...John Maynard Smith brought about the realization of the fallacy of the good of the species idea. This brought back the focus to individual selection and forced biologists to re-think evolutionary explanations for many apparently altruistic behaviours seen in animals. Maynard Smith took up the challenge of providing an explanation for animal conflicts from the individual rather than the species point of view. Along with George R Price he used game theory, originally developed by economists, to formulate the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS). ESS is a strategy that is evolutionarily stable because it is unbeatable by any other strategy. Game Theory and the concept of ESS have since been applied with success to a variety of situations including foraging, cooperation, communication, sex ratios, parent-offspring conflict, predator-prey interactions and so on." --Indian Academy of Science, Resonance, November 2005
Richard Dawkins, in his The Selfish Gene, credits Maynard Smith’s work as a ‘major stimulus that led me to […] write the whole book.’ "It is in chapter 5, 'Aggression: stability and the selfish machine' where you can read Dawkins’ description of evolutionary game theory – without any of the maths that was in the original paper of Maynard Smith and Price."--Encyclopedia Britannica
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