Talk:Evolutionary dynamics

Why does this exist?

Why does this article exist at all? It seems to reflect the framing used in one source: the book by Nowak. He deliberately uses the term "evolutionary dynamics" to refer to a broader set of topics than classical population genetics. This is explained on p. 4 of the Introduction to the book (follow the google link on the article page). Nowak says classical population genetics does not deal with the evolution of infectious disease agents, game theory, cancer and the evolution of language. This is not a widely used distinction so far as I can tell. Many population geneticists are now working on these topics, and the approaches do not necessarily rely on any special techniques of modeling. Wikipedia already has articles on Adaptive dynamics and Evolutionary game theory. In principle, this might be a useful article if it defined the topic broadly and supplied a clearly written paragraph for each topic (pop gen, infectious diseases, cancer, game theory, language) that links to other sources with more information. But even then, it is really just relying on one person's desire to define a broad category: the term "evolutionary dynamics" is not (to my knowledge) typically used to specify a broad category that goes beyond population genetics. In short, I think this article ought to be deleted. Dabs (talk) 23:04, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

I already replied about this article on the (appears to be now dormant) Evolutionary Biology WikiProject project page. Copying here. This article is very much a stub. Evolutionary dynamics was developed independently in theoretical biology in several different institutions, not solely by Nowak, in parallel with adaptive dynamics, the commonality being representation of evolution using dynamical systems and thus linked to evolutionary game theory through the modelling of dynamic games. (A redirect exists from dynamic games exists to sequential games, but this is not accurate in this context, and will also need to be changed.) So this article does need to be entirely rewritten, perhaps by combining with adaptive dynamics. Evolutionary invasion analysis is another article on an overlapping topic that needs to be either rewritten or combined with this article or both the two mentioned above. I have been aware of this for some time, apologies for not getting to it sooner.Worramlaup21 (talk) 21:33, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jaykhuti.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:43, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Moving article to Start class because too long for Stub

There is a lot of information to go in this article, much more than the original version, so I have removed the stub tag. I will change the article to Start-class in the Wikipedia project banner accordingly.Worramlaup21 (talk) 19:44, 15 January 2026 (UTC)

Relevance to WikiProject Game theory

Because this article desribes models that draw upon evolutionary game theory I suggest as a participant in the Game theory WikiProject that this article is of interest to that WikiProject. Accordingly I propose to add the Game theory WikiProject to the project banner at the top of this page. However, because this article refers only to a specialised area of the broad subject of game theory I propose to place its importance within the Game theory WikiProject as Low. The article is still under development, especially in the area of applications. Reply if you have any comments.Worramlaup21 (talk) 16:04, 19 January 2026 (UTC)