Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation

This is an article by Martin Nowak on the rules needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization via cooperation among agents.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ped/people/faculty/publications_nowak/Nowak_Science06.pdf

Clearly, the ideas are applicable to Swarm Intelligence and Software Agents as well as to theoretical history; a.k.a. Evolutionary Dynamics, a.k.a. historical simulations (think of the the PC game - Age of Empires).

The article, "Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism" (Science magazine, 8 December 2006:Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1569 - 1572) by Samuel Bowles discusses similar ideas within the context of human cultural evolution. There we read:

"Humans behave altruistically in natural settings and experiments. A possible explanation—that groups with more altruists survive when groups compete—has long been judged untenable on empirical grounds for most species. But there have been no empirical tests of this explanation for humans. My empirical estimates show that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism. Crucial to this process were distinctive human practices such as sharing food beyond the immediate family, monogamy, and other forms of reproductive leveling. These culturally transmitted practices presuppose advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities, possibly accounting for the distinctive forms of altruism found in our species."