It’s all over the news. Evolution promotes altruism, evolution rejects selfishness. I suppose other than this being a slow-news summer, this falls into the category of “man bites dog.” Weren’t we all taught that Darwinism was all about my survival, my selfishness? So what is this paper talking about?
About game theory. Variations on the “prisoner’s dilemma” game where two or more players are facing a hostile interviewer. If they rat on the other they get $10 (and the other guy none), but if they keep mum, both of them split $30. One can do this with people, or with computers, and many games are played to find the “cost” of keeping mum, etc. Various strategies are tried against each other, and the “all-around” winner turns out to be “tit for tat“. (And you give these guys research $ to discover this?) So our Darwin geniuses are trying this out with “genes” = “money”, and lo-and-behold, discover Evolution leads to “altruism”.