Nexus -- The Biology of Conflict Resolution

THE BIOLOGY OF CONFLICT AND COOPERATION

Across disciplines, the study of conflict and cooperation tends to be rather anthropomorphic - cooperative behavior is often viewed to be the cognitive province of humans alone with the meager efforts of non-human species being attributed to mere instinct. And yet, the intellectual scaffolding that we have used to understand Homo economicus, the perfectly rational man, fails to explain the emergence of cooperation. In this work, partially funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we have cast a wide interdisciplinary net, bringing together economists, evolutionary psychologists, biologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, and others to help us understand the commonalities related to cooperative behavior that may be genetically shared by all living things.

Dictyostelium discoideum.
Single-celled slime mold fruiting bodies produced by altruistic,
cooperative behavior triggered when food supplies become scarce.
Courtesy Michael Schleicher, LMU Müchen.

THE COMPUTATIONAL LABORATORY FOR COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Cooperation has played a key role in the evolution of various species, from single-celled organisms without any cognitive capacity whatsoever, to diverse species of birds and fish, from non-human primates such as chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys to humans, where the role of cooperation may have been most evolutionarily significant. Arriving at a coherent understanding of how cooperation can evolve in the face of self-regarding agents remains one of the most formidable challenges to those that study the management of conflict. At the same time, the study of network theory, complex systems, and nonlinear dynamics has pervaded all of science. Indeed, E. O. Wilson, who once characterized the evolution of cooperation as one of the greatest challenges for modern biology, more recently made a more emphatic appeal for research on complex systems. And yet, remarkably little work has been done that investigates the evolution of cooperation using network theory and the tools of complex systems analysis. Our work seeks to make contributions at the intersection of these two important areas of study.

Reciprocity emerging.
Random network of 200 agents constructed with connection probability,
p = .01. Agents are sized proportional to degree. After 5 generations of
10 PD games with deterministic imitation, reciprocating strategies (yellow
agents) are emerging towards population dominance.