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Phage-lift for game theory

Nature volume 398, pages 367–368 (1999)Cite this article

The prisoner's dilemma is a classic of game theory in which acting for individual advantage is pitted against acting for collective benefit. An example has been identified among clones of a virus that infects bacteria.

A virus is a natural-born cheat that makes its living by exploiting the vital functions of a host cell. Small wonder, then, that viruses also exploit each other. By neatly combining theory and experiments, Turner and Chao (page 441 of this issue1) have managed to demonstrate that certain phages — viruses that infect bacteria — actually engage in the prisoner's dilemma, that archetypal trap between cooperation and non-cooperation. Evolutionary game theorists will see this paper as a landmark. Indeed, it will be difficult to find players more primitive than the phage φ6 and its mutant clone φH2, stubby chunks of RNA that for their replication depend on a bacterial cell, and are therefore the subject of learned discussions as to whether they constitute life or not.

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Figure 1: Bacteriophages φ6 (red) and φH2 (blue), and the prisoner's dilemma.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 08540, New Jersey, USA

    Martin A. Nowak

  2. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Karl Sigmund

  3. Institute of Mathematics, University of Vienna, Strudlhofgasse 4, A-1090, Vienna, Austria

    Karl Sigmund

Authors
  1. Martin A. Nowak
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  2. Karl Sigmund
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Nowak, M., Sigmund, K. Phage-lift for game theory. Nature 398, 367–368 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/18761

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