  We study the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game,
where besides unconditional cooperation and defection, tit-for-tat,
win-stay-lose-shift and extortion are the five competing strategies. While
pairwise imitation fails to sustain unconditional cooperation and extortion
regardless of game parametrization, myopic updating gives rise to the
coexistence of all five strategies if the temptation to defect is sufficiently
large or if the degree distribution of the interaction network is
heterogeneous. This counterintuitive evolutionary outcome emerges as a result
of an unexpected chain of strategy invasions. Firstly, defectors emerge and
coarsen spontaneously among players adopting win-stay-lose-shift. Secondly,
extortioners and players adopting tit-for-tat emerge and spread via neutral
drift among the emerged defectors. And lastly, among the extortioners,
cooperators become viable too. These recurrent evolutionary invasions yield a
five-strategy phase that is stable irrespective of the system size and the
structure of the interaction network, and they reveal the most unexpected
mechanism that stabilizes extortion and cooperation in an evolutionary setting.
