Token vs type fitness and abstraction in evolutionary biology

There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and yet there are more than twenty-six letters in this sentence. How do we make sense of this?

Ever since I first started collaborating with David Basanta and Jacob Scott back in 2012/13, a certain tension about evolutionary games has been gnawing at me. A feeling that a couple of different concepts are being swept up under the rug of a single name.^[1] This feeling became stronger during my time at Moffitt, especially as I pushed for operationalizing evolutionary games. The measured games that I was imagining were simply not the same sort of thing as the games implemented in agent-based models. Finally this past November, as we were actually measuring the games that cancer plays, a way to make the tension clear finally crystallized for me: the difference between reductive and effective games could be linked to two different conceptions of fitness.

This showed a new door for me: philosophers of biology have already done extensive conceptual analysis of different versions of fitness. Unfortunately, due to various time pressures, I could only peak through the keyhole before rushing out my first draft on the two conceptions of evolutionary games. In particular, I didn’t connect directly to the philosophy literature and just named the underlying views of fitness after the names I’ve been giving to the games: reductive fitness and effective fitness.

Now, after a third of a year busy teaching and revising other work, I finally had a chance to open that door and read some of the philosophy literature. This has provided me with a better vocabulary and clearer categorization of fitness concepts. Instead of defining reductive vs effective fitness, the distinction I was looking for is between token fitness and type fitness. And in this post, I want to discuss that distinction. I will synthesize some of the existing work in a way that is relevant to separating reductive vs. effective games. In the process, I will highlight some missing points in the current debates. I suspect this points have been overlooked because most of the philosophers of biology are focused more on macroscopic organisms instead of the microscopic systems that motivated me.^[2]

Say what you will of birds and ornithology, but I am finding reading philosophy of biology to be extremely useful for doing ‘actual’ biology. I hope that you will, too.

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Symmetry breaking and non-cell-autonomous growth rates in cancer

“You can’t step in the same river twice” might seem like an old aphorism of little value, but I think it is central to making sense of the sciences. This is especially clear if we rephrase it as: “you can’t do the same experiment twice”. After all, a replication experiment takes place at a different time, sometimes a different place, maybe done by a different experimenter. Why should any of the countless rules that governed the initial experiment still hold for the replicate? But our methodology demands that we must be able to repeat experiments. We achieve by making a series of symmetry assumptions. For example: the universality or homogeneity of physical laws. We can see this with early variants of the principle of sufficient reason in Anaximander and Aristotle. It developed closer to the modern statements with Galileo, Copernicus and Newton by pushing the laws of physics outside the sublunary sphere and suggesting that the planets follows the same laws as the apple. In fact, Alfred North Whitehead considered a belief in trustworthy uniformity of physical laws to be the defining feature of western philosophy (and science) since Thales.

In this post, I want to go through some of the symmetries we assume and how to break them. And I want to discuss this at levels from grand cosmology to the petri dish. In the process, I’ll touch on the fundamental constants of physics, how men stress out mice, and how standard experimental practices in cancer biology assume a cell-autonomous process symmetry.

Deadlock & Leader as deformations of Prisoner’s dilemma & Hawk-Dove games

Recently, I’ve been working on revisions for our paper on measuring the games that cancer plays. One of the concerns raised by the editor is that we don’t spend enough time introducing game theory and in particular the Deadlock and Leader games that we observed. This is in large part due to the fact that these are not the most exciting games and not much theoretic efforts have been spent on them in the past. In fact, none that I know of in mathematical oncology.

With that said, I think it is possible to relate the Deadlock and Leader games to more famous games like Prisoner’s dilemma and the Hawk-Dove games; both that I’ve discussed at length on TheEGG. Given that I am currently at the Lorentz Center in Leiden for a workshop on Understanding Cancer Through Evolutionary Game Theory (follow along on twitter via #cancerEGT), I thought it’d be a good time to give this description here. Maybe it’ll inspire some mathematical oncologists to play with these games.

Cataloging a sparse year of blogging: IMO workshop and preprints

Happy 2018!

With 2017 finally behind us, TheEGG enters its 8th calendar year. This past year has been a slow one for the blog, with only 10 new articles and two posts cataloguing 2016 (on cancer and on more theoretical aspects of evolution and general modelling). Half the months were barren: I posted nothing in March, April, May, July, August, September; and only October and November saw more than one post. But those two months of activity were good. We saw the list of TheEGG authors joined by David Robert Grimes, Vincent Cannataro, and Matthew Wicker; plus the return of Robert Vander Velde.

If you’re keeping score at home, this means that I only wrote six new articles last year.

As in the past, I want to start the new year by summarizing the old.

Replicator dynamics and the simplex as a vector space

Over the years of TheEGG, I’ve chronicled a number of nice properties of the replicator equation and its wide range of applications. From a theoretical perspective, I showed how the differential version can serve as the generator for the action that is the finite difference version of replicator dynamics. And how measurements of replicator dynamics can correspond to log-odds. From an application perspective, I talked about how replicator dynamics can be realized in many different ways. This includes a correspondance to idealized replating experiments and a representation of populations growing toward carrying capacity via fictitious free-space strategies. These fictitious strategies are made apparent by using a trick to factor and nest the replicator dynamics. The same trick can also help us to use the symmetries of the fitness functions for dimensionality reduction and to prove closed orbits in the dynamics. And, of course, I discussed countless heuristic models and some abductions that use replicator dynamics.

But whenever some object becomes so familiar and easy to handle, I get worried that I am missing out on some more foundational and simple structure underlying it. In the case of replicator dynamics, Tom Leinster’s post last year on the n-Category Cafe pointed me to the simple structure that I was missing: the vector space structure of the simplex. This allows us to use linear algebra — the friendliest tool in the mathematician’s toolbox — in a new way to better understand evolutionary dynamics.

A 2-simplex with some of its 1-dimensional linear subspaces drawn by Greg Egan.

Given my interest in operationalization of replicator dynamics, I will use some of the terminology and order of presentation from Aitchison’s (1986) statistical analysis of compositional data. We will see that a number of operations that we define will have clear experimental and evolutionary interpretations.

I can’t draw any real conclusions from this, but I found it worth jotting down for later reference. If you can think of a way to make these observations useful then please let me know.

Ontology of player & evolutionary game in reductive vs effective theory

In my views of game theory, I largely follow Ariel Rubinstein: game theory is a set of fables. A collection of heuristic models that helps us structure how we make sense of and communicate about the world. Evolutionary game theory was born of classic game theory theory through a series of analogies. These analogies are either generalizations or restrictions of the theory depending on if you’re thinking about the stories or the mathematics. Given this heuristic genealogy of the field — and my enjoyment of heuristic models — I usually do not worry too much about what exactly certain ontic terms like strategy, player, or game really mean or refer to. I am usually happy to leave these terms ambiguous so that they can motivate different readers to have different interpretations and subsequently push for different models of different experiments. I think it is essential for heuristic theories to foster this diverse creativity. Anything goes.

However, not everyone agrees with Ariel Rubinstein and me; some people think that EGT isn’t “just” heuristics. In fact, more recently, I have also shifted some of my uses of EGT from heuristics to abductions. When this happens, it is no longer acceptable for researchers to be willy-nilly with fundamental objects of the theory: strategies, players, and games.

The biggest culprit is the player. In particular, a lot of confusion stems from saying that “cells are players”. In this post, I’d like to explore two of the possible positions on what constitutes players and evolutionary games.

Hackathons and a brief history of mathematical oncology

It was Friday — two in the morning. And I was busy fine-tuning a model in Mathematica and editing slides for our presentation. My team and I had been running on coffee and snacks all week. Most of us had met each other for the first time on Monday, got an inkling of the problem space we’d be working on, brainstormed, and hacked together a number of equations and a few chunks of code to prototype a solution. In seven hours, we would have to submit our presentation to the judges. Fifty thousand dollars in start-up funding was on the line.

A classic hackathon, except for one key difference: my team wasn’t just the usual mathematicians, programmers, computer & physical scientists. Some of the key members were biologists and clinicians specializing in blood cancers. And we weren’t prototyping a new app. We were trying to predict the risk of relapse for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, who had stopped receiving imatinib. This was 2013 and I was at the 3rd annual integrated mathematical oncology workshop. It was one of my first exposures to using mathematical and computational tools to study cancer; the field of mathematical oncology.

As you can tell from other posts on TheEGG, I’ve continued thinking about and working on mathematical oncology. The workshops have also continued. The 7th annual IMO workshop — focused on stroma this year — is starting right now. If you’re not in Tampa then you can follow #MoffittIMO on twitter.

Since I’m not attending in person this year, I thought I’d provide a broad overview based on an article I wrote for Oxford Computer Science’s InSPIRED Research (see pg. 20-1 of this pdf for the original) and a paper by Helen Byrne (2010).

Poor reasons for preprints & post-publication peer-review

Last week, I revived the blog with some reflections on open science. In particular, I went into the case for pre-prints and the problem with the academic publishing system. This week, I want to continue this thread by examining three common arguments for preprints: speed, feedback, and public access. I think that these arguments are often motivated in the wrong way. In their standard presentation, they are bad arguments for a good idea. By pointing out these perceived shortcoming, I hope that we can develop more convincing arguments for preprints. Or maybe methods of publication that are even better than the current approach to preprints.

These thoughts are not completely formed, and I am eager to refine them in follow up posts. As it stand, this is more of a hastily written rant.

Preprints and a problem with academic publishing

This is the 250th post on the Theory, Evolutionary, and Games Group Blog. And although my posting pace has slowed in recent months, I see this as a milestone along the continuing road of open science. And I want to take this post as an opportunity to make some comments on open science.

To get this far, I’ve relied on a lot of help and encouragement. Both directly from all the wonderful guest posts and comments, and indirectly from general recognition. Most recently, this has taken the form of the Canadian blogging and science outreach network Science Borealis recognized us as one of the top 12 science blogs in Canada.

Given this connection, it is natural to also view me as an ally of other movements associated with open science; like, (1) preprints and (2) post-publication peer-review (PPPR). To some extent, I do support both of these activities. First, I regularly post my papers to ArXiv & BioRxiv. Just in the two preceeding months, I’ve put out a paper on the complexity of evolutionary equilibria and joint work on how fibroblasts and alectinib switch the games that cancers play. Another will follow later this month based on our project during the 2016 IMO Workshop. And I’ve been doing this for a while: the first draft of my evolutionary equilibria paper, for example, is older than BioRxiv — which only launched in November 2013. More than 20 years after physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists started using ArXiv.

Second, some might think of my blog posts as PPPRs. For example. occasionally I try to write detailed comments on preprints and published papers. For example, my post on fusion and sex in proto-cells commenting on a preprint by Sam Sinai, Jason Olejarz and their colleagues. Finally, I am impressed and made happy by the now iconic graphic on the growth of preprints in biology.

But that doesn’t mean I find these ideas to be beyond criticism, and — more importantly — it doesn’t mean that there aren’t poor reasons for supporting preprints and PPPR.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of articles and tweets written on this topic both for and against (or neutral toward) pre-prints and for PPPR. Even Nature is telling us to embrace preprints. In the coming series of posts, I want to share some of my reflections on the case for preprints, and also argue that there isn’t anything all that revolutionary or transformative in them. If we want progress then we should instead think in terms of working papers. And as for post-publications peer review — instead, we should promote a culture of commentaries, glosses, and literature review/synthesis.

Currently, we do not publish papers to share ideas. We have ideas just to publish papers. And we need to change this aspect academic culture.

In this post, I will sketch some of the problems with academic publishing. Problems that I think any model of sharing results will have to address.

Spatializing the Go-vs-Grow game with the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about small projects to get students started with evolutionary game theory. One idea that came to mind is to look at games that have been analyzed in the inviscid regime then ‘spatialize’ them and reanalyze them. This is usually not difficult to do and provides some motivation to solving for and making sense of the dynamic regimes of a game. And it is not always pointless, for example, our edge effects paper (Kaznatcheev et al, 2015) is mostly just a spatialization of Basanta et al.’s (2008a) Go-vs-Grow game together with some discussion.

Technically, TheEGG together with that paper have everything that one would need to learn this spatializing technique. However, I realized that my earlier posts on spatializing with the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform might a bit too abstract and the paper a bit too terse for a student who just started with EGT. As such, in this post, I want to go more slowly through a concrete example of spatializing an evolutionary game. Hopefully, it will be useful to students. If you are a beginner to EGT that is reading this post, and something doesn’t make sense then please ask for clarification in the comments.

I’ll use the Go-vs-Grow game as the example. I will focus on the mathematics, and if you want to read about the biological or oncological significance then I encourage you to read Kaznatcheev et al. (2015) in full.