Five rules for the evolution of cooperation

Nowak, M. A. (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314(5805), 1560-1563.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2006

Volume

314

Issue

5805

Pages

1560-1563

DOI

10.1126/science.1133755

DOI registrant

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Link

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1133755

Cited from

economics_finance, information_theory

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Cooperation
  • A diplomat analyzing treaty compliance, a biologist studying mutualism, and an engineer designing a peer-to-peer protocol can all reduce their problem to the same two questions, and can borrow solutions across the boundary.

    This sourceSynthesizes the finite stabilizer menu — kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity (reputation), network reciprocity, group selection — each a benefit-to-cost condition, supporting inferences about cooperation across kin groups vs strangers and across scale.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Nowak shows kin selection covers relatives and that reputation-based indirect reciprocity sustains help among strangers who need not meet again, but he does not discuss formal institutions or third-party enforcement as scaling mechanisms.

    “It is unsatisfactory to have a theory that can only explain cooperation among relatives. We also observe cooperation between unrelated individuals or even between members of different species.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Social Dilemma
  • Cheating (taking the benefit of a partner's cooperation without paying the cost) pays the individual, yet populations of cooperators outcompete populations of defectors; the puzzle is resolved through repetition, kinship, reputation, and partner choice, a research program Nowak (2006) organized into five recurring rules for the emergence of cooperation.

    This sourceSynthesizes the finite menu of stabilizing mechanisms—kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity (reputation), network reciprocity, and group selection—each reducible to a benefit-to-cost condition, supporting inferences about when cooperation is stable across kin groups versus interactions among strangers.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Supports the defector advantage within groups, the cooperator-population advantage, and the five-rules scheme; but partner choice is not one of Nowak's five mechanisms.

    “Remarkably, however, a population of only cooperators has the highest average fitness, while a population of only defectors has the lowest.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 2 citations: 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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