Behavioral Strategy Chases Promote the Evolution of Prey Intelligence*

Predator-prey coevolution is commonly thought to result in reciprocal arms races that produce increasingly extreme and complex traits. However, such directional change is not inevitable. Here, we provide evidence for a previously undemonstrated dynamic that we call ’strategy chases,’ wherein populations explore strategies with similar levels of complexity, but differing behaviorally. Indeed, in populations of evolving digital organisms, as prey …