What a great eBook for learning how to solve problems in Matlab: Experiments in Matlab. It covers topics like Google Page Rank, Game of Life, Sudoko, Shallow Water Equations any many more. A perfect tutorial like introduction that shows you immediately the practical use of being able to program (in any kind of language).
Nowak, Martin A. 2006: Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation, Science 314: 1560–63
This paper provides a very easy to understand mathematical approach for the evolution of cooperation.
Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation. Cooperation means that selfish replicators forgo some of their reproductive potential to help one another. But natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work. Here I discuss five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. For each mechanism, a simple rule is derived that specifies whether natural selection can lead to cooperation.
