Reddit reviews Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life

Given your background, you could read Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2007). It's really short, but it assumes the reader is familiar with probability theory and a fair amount of mathematics. Binmore has another textbook Playing for Real (2007) which is goes much more in depth. It assumes the reader is familiar with linear algebra.

One of the central results of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1928) is the minimax theorem. This was John von Neumann's favorite theorem from that book. John Nash generalized this in his PhD thesis in 1950. The minimax theorem establishes the existence of Nash equilibrium for zero-sum games with finite players and strategies. Nash's extended this and showed that any normal form game with finite players and strategies has an equilibrium. You might have seen the movie A Beautiful Mind which depicted John Nash working on this. If you are interested, you can read about Nash's proof in Luce and Raiffa's Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (1957). The proof does assumes the reader is familiar with point set topology.

Outside of economics, game theory is also applied to evolutionary biology. One of the best books on evolutionary game theory is Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life (2006). You might also like John Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982). Maynard Smith assumes the reader is familiar with homogenous differential equations.

Hope this helps!

You may find "Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life" by Novak, especially chapter 13, to be an interesting/relevant read.

I really enjoyed Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life by Martin Novak.

My undergraduate degree is in mathematics with a mathematical ecology concentration, and I love my current Ph.D. research. (I think it's hard to go wrong with a math major as an undergrad, if you're good at it -- you can use it for anything.) I'm planning to go into academia for a career, but depending on your specific interests there are all kinds of government or consulting jobs for good ecological modelers.

A few books on Amazon that may give you a taste for the field (any given person's specialty will more closely align with just one of them, but I'm trying to convey the broad options):

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Animal-Behavior-Dugatkin/dp/0195137906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260173721&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Individual-based-Modeling-Princeton-Theoretical-Computational/dp/069109666X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260173431&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Models-Biology-Stephen-Ellner/dp/0691125899/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260173431&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

I'd recommend looking for some of these in your university library, then just browsing through everything next to them at the shelves and seeing if anything jumps out at you.

If you enjoyed that paper, I'd recommend a book called Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life by Martin A. Nowak. It's a little dry, and I haven't finished it yet, but it's well presented and reads like a book rather than a textbook.

>George W. Bush

Went to Yale and Harvard and isn't as stupid as he looks. And while he's the figurehead, the reins of power are shared among everyone in the government, all of whom went to university and studied the Greeks and Romans.

>I bet there are a bunch of undiscovered civilizations and we are living just fine without their discovery. Archaelogy only purpose is to satisfied our curiosity, it has zero impact in today world, is just a really interesting hobby.

That's like saying (100 years ago) that there are lots of scientific ideas that we are living fine without. Or to put it more generally, what we don't know doesn't matter.

> This guy discovered by accident.

From your very source, "The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871, was not at first apparent"

Without evolutionary theory, DNA is practically irrelevant. Without DNA combined with the theory of common ancestry, genetic science simply doesn't exist or doesn't make any sense. Without genetic science, our understanding of the nature of a large fraction of disease and heredity would be nonexistent.

> I´m not saying "if we dropped the scientific method", i´m saying if we dropped those three sciences 100 years ago the world would be pretty much the same, this doesn´t mean there are not interesting fields only that they give us a look into the past but nothing to the future.

> Please tell me i really want to know.

I spend a lot of time working on resource optimization problems utilizing computational genetic optimization tools based on the foundation of evolutionary theory -- surivival of the fittest, random mutation, and hereditary descent. These tools and methodologies are a direct outgrowth of evolutionary theory.

I have friends who work in cytogenetics (in disease diagnosis) and in evodevo (fiddling with nematodes). None of what they do makes any sense without first understanding the evolutionary heritage of the diseases involved or the developmental patterns that preceded them.

What you have to understand is that without evolutionary theory linking together all of the various forms of life, they would be mysterious black boxes, each with obvious commonalities with no obvious explanation. We'd have big lists of different creatures with surprisingly similar features and no cogent story to place them in. The tree of life (phylogenetic tree, not to be confused with metaphysical mumbojumbo also referred to as the tree of life) that we all see in biology class is the result of evolutionary theory and gives us that context in which to talk about the interrelatedness of the world around us. That was the state of biology before the integration that evolution gave us.

Yes, before evolutionary theory there was a sort of tree of life that people had in their minds, generally variations on the "great chain of being" that God laid out in the beginning. The great difference between that limited perspective and what evolutionary theory gives us is the ability to make predictions. It allows us to take in observations and use them to generate new hypotheses that lead us to great discoveries. A pre-evolutionary perspective is a distinctly passive passenger in the quest for knowledge.

If you're interested in getting some specifics on exactly how evolutionary theory reaches out into the world that you live in, try this:

http://www.amazon.ca/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382

Martin Nowak, "Evolutionary Dynamics".

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382

That'll answer all your questions about predictive models. All systems can be described by math, though chaotic systems--like, you know, life--are a lot harder to do that with. We can barely predict the weather.

For more math in biology, look at most papers by the theorists like Hamilton. Or maybe anything that has to do with bioinformatics.

Now that I think of it, the simplest and most concrete examples of prediction come from genetics. Make a quick Punnett square and you'll see.

If you like game theory, you will absolutely love Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. This is a groundbreaking work by Martin Nowak, arguably the leading researcher in Evolutionary Theory today.

The mathematical study of evolution is a good bit more broad than population genetics. Two great books on mathematical models of evolution:

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Theory-Sean-H-Rice/dp/0878937021

The actual title is a little longer, here it is on amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Dynamics-Exploring-Equations-Life/dp/0674023382