Using mathematical and computer simulations, Nowak divided populations into “cooperators,” those who support others, and “defectors,” those who do not support others even after accepting help from others. Nowak found that in the several thousand papers scientists have published on how cooperators, ranging from bacteria to human beings, prevail in evolution, all the scenarios fall into five categories. (Nowak 2012) One category, for example, is “spatial selection,” in which cooperators and defectors are not uniformly distributed in a population. In these populations with “patches of
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