Alarm-calling behavior is common in many species that suffer from predation. While kin selection or reciprocal altruism are typically invoked to explain such a behaviour, several authors have conjectured that some alarm calls may instead be costly signals sent by prey to inform approaching...

How do organisms communicate honestly despite conflicts of interest? Over the past quarter-century, the "costly signalling" hypothesis -- that signal honesty can be ensured by appropriate signal cost -- has emerged as the dominant explanation for this puzzle. First proposed by Zahavi [1, 2] and...

Using mostly elementary considerations, we find out who wins the game of Domineering on all rectangular boards of width 2, 3, 5, and 7. We obtain bounds on other boards as well, and prove the existence of polynomial-time strategies for playing on all boards of width 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 11. We...

During the evolution of life, there have been several transitions in which individuals began to cooperate, forming higher levels of organization, and sometimes losing their independent reproductive identity (Bonner, 1988; Maynard-Smith and Szathmary, 1995; Wilson, 1971; Buss, 1987; Jablonka, 1994). For example,...

Sub-populations of cooperators and defectors inhabit sites on a lattice. The interactions among the individuals at a site, in the form of a prisoners-dilemma (PD) game, determine their fitnesses. The PD pay-off parameters are chosen so that cooperators are able to maintain a homogeneous...

The polygamy threshold model states that if costs incurred are less than the benefits gained from a polygamous relationship in terms of male or habitat quality, then polygamy is favored and could evolve. Here we construct mathematical models and computer simulations to evaluate this hypothesis...

In an influential paper, Grafen (1990) provided a mathematical demonstration of the validity of Zahavi's handicap principle . Grafen showed how an honest signalling system is stabilized through costly signalling: cost stabilizes the system when the cost of lying is greater than any benefit...

In this paper we assume that parents use the signalling intensity of their young to determine how much food they bring to the nest, and that the pattern of food allocation is determined by the signalling intensity and by the intensity of other non-signalling behaviours that are not preceived by...

It has been well-known since the pioneering work of Claude Shannon in the 1940s that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency over a channel of limited bandwidth is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver who is unfamiliar with the language in which the message is written. In this...

How did human language arise, and what accounts for its present structure? Over the past decade, there has been great interest -- and impressive progress -- in using evolutionary theory to address to these and related questions. In particular, a number of studies have shown that several key...