Related papers: An evolutionary advantage of cooperation
Recent works suggest that pooling and sharing may constitute a fundamental mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in well-mixed fluctuating environments. The rationale is that, by reducing the amplitude of fluctuations, pooling and…
Without contributing, defectors take more benefit from social resources than cooperators which is the reflection of a specific character of individuals. However, natural physical mechanisms of our society promote cooperation. Thus, in the…
Understanding the evolutionary stability of cooperation is a central problem in biology, sociology, and economics. There exist only a few known mechanisms that guarantee the existence of cooperation and its robustness to cheating. Here, we…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for evolution of cooperation based on repeated interactions between the same individuals. But high levels of cooperation evolve only if the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds a certain threshold that…
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies. While several basic theoretical mechanisms underlying its evolution have been established, research addressing more realistic settings remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the hypothesis that…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
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…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Cooperative behaviors are defined as the production of common goods benefitting all members of the community at the producer's cost. They could seem to be in contradiction with natural selection, as non-cooperators have an increased fitness…
Most real life systems have a random component: the multitude of endogenous and exogenous factors influencing them result in stochastic fluctuations of the parameters determining their dynamics. These empirical systems are in many cases…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…
Cooperation is the cornerstone of human evolutionary success. Like no other species, we champion the sacrifice of personal benefits for the common good, and we work together to achieve what we are unable to achieve alone. Knowledge and…
Range expansion is a universal process in biological systems, and therefore plays a part in biological evolution. Using a quantitative individual-based method based on the stochastic process, we identify that enhancing the inherent…
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…
We propose a model of emergence of cooperation in evolutionary games that high- lights the role of network formation and effect of network structure. In line with empirical data, the model proposes a mechanism that explains the persistence…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…