Contact Details
Alexander Stewart
Royal Society University Research Fellow
UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment
- Tel: 020 7679 0079
- Ext: 30079
- alex.stewart@ucl.ac.uk
- 631 Darwin Building, Gower Street London, WC1E 6BT
Human Evolution Interest
I use mathematical and computational methods to study questions of evolutionary biology and social behaviour. I am especially interested in the relationship between population genetics and social evolution. I work mostly on questions concerning the potential for complex adaptations in evolving systems, the dynamics of repeated social interactions, and the impact of genetic architecture on evolutionary dynamics.
Cooperative interactions are the basic units of social bahaviour. In higher organisms, and especially in humans, such interactions are many and various. But even among the simplest bacteria, basic cooperative interactions can be complicated to evolve and maintain. I study how behavioural strategies, which determine when an organism will engage in cooperation, change over time in a population. I am especially interested in how the evolution of such strategies is altered by access to information such as memory of past interactions, the public reputation of other individuals, the spatial structure of the population and the relatedness between individuals. I aim to quantify and predict how long it takes behavioural norms to become established in a population, and how long a norm will persist once it is established.