Evolutionary game theory of continuous traits from a causal perspective

Modern evolutionary game theory typically deals with the evolution of continuous, quantitative traits under weak selection, allowing the incorporation of rich biological detail and complicated nonlinear interactions. While these models are commonly used to find candidates for evolutionary endpoints and to approximate evolutionary trajectories, a less appreciated property is their potential to expose and clarify the causal structure of evolutionary processes. The mathematical step of differentiation breaks a nonlinear model into additive components which are more intuitive to interpret, and when combined with a proper causal hypothesis, partial derivatives in such models have a causal meaning. Such an approach has been used in the causal analysis of game-theoretical models in an informal manner. Here we formalize this approach by linking evolutionary game theory to concepts developed in causal modelling over the past century, from path coefficients to the recently proposed causal derivative. There is a direct correspondence between the causal derivative and the derivative used in evolutionary game theory. Some game theoretical models (e.g. kin selection) consist of multiple causal derivatives. Components of these derivatives correspond to components of the causal derivative, to path coefficients, and to edges on a causal graph, formally linking evolutionary game theory to causal modelling. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions’.