evolutionarily stable strategy

• evolutionary stable strategy (misconstruction)

Coined by British biologist John Maynard Smith in 1972 in his paper Game Theory and The Evolution of Fighting.

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evolutionarily stable strategy (plural evolutionarily stable strategies)

1. (evolutionary theory, game theory) A strategy that, when adopted by a population, is effective and not foreseeably likely to be replaced by another strategy.

   Synonym: ESS

   • 1986 John Maynard Smith: Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press

     In this chapter, I introduce the concept of an "evolutionarily stable strategy", or ESS. A 'strategy' is a behavioural phenotype; i.e. it is a specification of what an individual will do in any situation in which it may find itself. An ESS is a strategy such that, if all the members of a population adopt it, then no mutant strategy could invade the population under the influence of natural selection. The concept is couched in terms of a "strategy" because it arose in the context of animal behaviour. The idea, however, can be applied equally well to any kind of phenotypic variation, and the word strategy could be replaced by the word phenotype; for example, a strategy could be the growth form of a plant, or the age at first reproduction, or the relative numbers of sons and daughters produced by a parent.

   • 1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene:

     To be an evolutionarily stable strategy, remember, a strategy must not be invadable, when it is common, by a rare mutant strategy.

   • 1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene:

     An evolutionarily stable strategy is a strategy that does well against copies of itself.

• ESS (initialism)

• Nash equilibrium