The evolution of altruism and cooperation poses a long-standing evolutionary paradox. One of the solutions that has been proposed is recognition: if individuals could direct their altruistic behaviour to other altruists, thus avoiding being exploited by selfish, non-altruistic individuals altruistic and cooperative behaviour could, in theory, evolve. The simplest recognition system is a conspicuous, heritable tag, for example a green beard (the example is due to Richard Dawkins). It has, however, been argued that the `green beard effect' is practically implausible, despite the fact that some of such genes have been found. We have modelled the green beard effect and found that if the recognition tags are diverse, altruism is easily facilitated. Beard colour diversity allows altruism to evolve and be maintained. We have called the resulting evolutionary dynamics "beard chromodynamics" because many beard colours cooccur in dynamic mosaic in the population. I will explain the background of the fascination of biologists with the evolution of altruism and discuss the interesting dynamics of a simple model for beard chromodynamics.
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