Related papers: How to measure group selection in real-world popul…
Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations…
Multilevel selection is an important organizing principle that crucially underlies evolutionary processes from the emergence of cells to eusociality and the economics of nations. Previous studies on multilevel selection assumed that the…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
One of the fundamental problems in biology concerns the method by which a cluster of organisms can regulate the proportion of individuals that perform various roles or modes as if each individual knows a whole situation without a leader. A…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
In many biological systems, natural selection acts simultaneously on multiple levels of organization. This scenario typically presents an evolutionary conflict between the incentive of individuals to cheat and the collective incentive to…
In the last years the Prisoner Dilemma (PD) has become a paradigm for the study of the emergence of cooperation in spatially structured populations. Such structure is usually assumed to be given by a graph. In general, the success of…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Decision-making societies may vary in their level of cooperation and degree of conservatism, both of which influence their overall performance. Moreover, these factors are not fixed -- they can change based on the decisions agents in the…
We consider a dynamic collective choice problem where a large number of players are cooperatively choosing between multiple destinations while being influenced by the behavior of the group. For example, in a robotic swarm exploring a new…
The spatial structure of populations may promote the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma is favored under specific update rules in evolutionary graph theory models with one individual per node of…
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…
Moran or Wright-Fisher processes are probably the most well known model to study the evolution of a population under various effects. Our object of study will be the Simpson index which measures the level of diversity of the population, one…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…