ABSTRACT
In this lecture, I want to bring together two bodies of evolutionary theory and then apply the resulting amalgam to a very interesting problem, the evolution of norms in human societies. The two bodies of theory are:
Evolutionary game theory provides simple, analytically tractable models of the evolution of social behavior. Originally developed by biologists, it has recently been adopted by economists dissatisfied with “traditional” game theory which assumes perfectly rational agents.
The theory of evolution in structured populations provides models of evolution in populations that are subdivided so that mating, social and ecological interactions are not uniform throughout the population. It has been developed by population geneticists interested in more basic problems such as the evolution of sets of co-adapted genes.
