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In 1795, philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed rules to promote perpetual peace among nations (1). He first required that all nations be republics, because when “the consent of the subjects is required to determine whether there shall be war or not, nothing is more natural than that they should weigh the matter well, before undertaking such a bad business” ref. 1, p. 122. In contrast, a despotic ruler “does not lose a whit by the war, while he goes on enjoying the delights of his table or sport, or of his pleasure palaces and gala days. He can therefore decide on war for the most trifling reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party” ref. 1, p. 123. In a PNAS paper that marries evolutionary game theory with tests of data from a long-term study of banded mongooses (Fig. 1), Johnstone et al. (2) confirm Kant’s insight that destructive intergroup fighting becomes more likely when leaders have more to gain, or less to lose, from fighting than do their followers.
Fig. 1.
Banded mongooses from the study population at Queen Elizabeth Park, Uganda. The adult is wearing a radio collar. Image credit: Becky Sun (photographer).
For this study, Johnstone et al. (2) adapt the classic Hawk−Dove model for intergroup contests, examining the range of conditions favoring aggressive (“Hawk”) and peaceful (“Dove”) strategies. The Hawk−Dove model has yielded numerous insights into the evolution of animal conflict since Maynard Smith and Price’s 1973 paper (3), which sought to explain why animal contests are frequently less destructive than we might expect: snakes wrestle with rivals, rather than using their fangs, and stags lock antlers rather than stabbing with their prongs. They found that a peaceful mutant …
↵1Email: wilso198{at}umn.edu.
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Hawks, Doves, and mongooses
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