Coevolution of Mercy and Altruistic Cooperation

Abstract

Besides altruistic punishment and group selection, we argue that, mercy can lead to altruistic cooperation. Modeling the micro economic behavior of the mercy, with two alleles of genes (Cooperation or Defection & Mercy or No mercy) agents in a network, we present the computational simulation results in the spatiotemporal evolution game theory frame to prove the above argument. Here, mercy (or as 'Love thy neighbors') means, the agents, with mercy preference, might share his own fitness with his poorest neighbor who poorer than himself.