Evolutionary game theory is designed to capture the essentials of the characteristic interactions among individuals. Its most prominent application is the quest for the origins and evolution of cooperation. The effects of population structures on the performance of behavioral strategies became apparent only in recent years and marks the advent of an intriguing link between apparently unrelated disciplines. Evolutionary game theory in structured populations reveals critical phase transitions that fall into the universality class of directed percolation on square lattices and mean-field-type transitions on regular small world networks and random regular graphs. We employ the prisoner’s dilemma to discuss new insights gained in behavioral ecology using methods from physics.
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