Equation 15 · Part 1 · Why We Punish Strangers: The Evolution of Human Cooperation
Symbol w_p
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is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
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which falls as the residual pool of defectors, 1 - x - y , shrinks. Once a group happens to reach a state where . punishing costs less at the margin than plain, unpunishing cooperation does, and ordinary within-group selection stops working against the punishing type in that group. If groups that reach this state also out-compete or out-reproduce groups that never do — amplified, the authors argue, by cultural transmission mechanisms such as conformist imitation of locally common strategies, which are not available to purely genetic evolution — group-level selection can carry punishment, and the large-scale cooperation it sustains, to frequencies individual selection alone…
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