So I came across a link from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explaining that evolutionary game theory is… totally irrelevant. The million dollar question surrounding evolutionary game theory is “What does it explain about real life?” Well, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is supposed to explain where we came from, so if we follow this path then evolutionary game theory should provide some explanation of how a social aspect was created. However, to me it seems like evolutionary game theory wouldn’t be the way to answer such a question, since we will never be able to duplicate conditions in our model to produce something as hair-trigger as evolution. Rather, it seems like it would be much better to do historical research and try to ascertain the events that led up to the aspect in question. Now, of course this could be difficult to do, or even impossible. However, we would only have a chance to run an evolution simulation for very recently occurring social aspects. To try and go back to 1800 and duplicate conditions would be impossible. And for anything more recent, we’d be better off going with a historical explanation.

Furthermore, if we were to use evolutionary game theory to simulate actual evolution, we’d be doing nature a huge disservice. The idea of (micro) evolution is based on environmental factors causing shifts in the percentage breakdown of alleles within a population. There is no game being played here. Rather the environment kills off those who were unlucky enough to have the wrong alleles, but no conscious choice as to which alleles are passed on is ever made.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-evolutionary/#4