Evolutionarily Stable Strategies

When natural selection acts on several different alter-native behaviors, the most optimal should be favored. If costs and benefits of alternatives depend on choices made by other individuals, optimal solutions are not always as obvious as they are in simpler situations. An evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS, is a mathemati-cal definition for an optimal choice of strategy under such conditions. Interactions between two individuals can be de-picted as a mathematical game between two players. A branch of mathematics, called game theory, seeks to find the best strategy to play in any given carefully defined game. The central problem of game theory is to find the best strategy to take in a game that depends on what other players are expected to do