ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on applications of game theory to problems of biological evolution. The basic ideas were first set forth in an unpublished paper on ritualized fighting in animals by George Price and subsequently developed by John Maynard Smith (1972; Maynard Smith and Price, 1973), but they can be traced back through the work of Hamilton (1967) on the evolution of sex ratios, and Lewontin (1961) on speciation and extinction, to Fisher's (1930) discussion of various evolutionary phenomena, including sexual selection. The theoretical principles and supporting empirical evidence have been reviewed several times (e.g., Axelrod and Dion, 1988; Dawkins, 1976, 1989; Hines, 1987; Krebs and Davies, 1991; Lazarus, 1982, 1987, 1994; Maynard Smith, 1974, 1976a, 1978a, 1978b, 1979, 1982, 1984; Parker, 1978). One influential biologist has expressed the view that this work may represent" one of the most important advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin" (Dawkins, 1976, p. 90).
