Altruistic punishment
There’s an interesting article on Gene Expression about co-operation in evolution. The basic idea is that many groups of animals (or whatever) show cooperation, working together for the good of the group but not necessarily the individual. What’s strange is that it should be possible for an individual renegade to not cooperate and take advantage of everyone else’s generosity. Although they come out ahead, if everyone were to cheat, then the group as a whole would lose out. So how do you make this this sort of thing stable?
The post explains one possible explanation for it, and summarises a recent paper which suggests how this kind of situation could evolve. It’s quite interesting!