Oscillatory dynamics in the coevolution of cooperation and mobility
Authored by Shinsuke Suzuki, Hiromichi Kimura
Date Published: 2011
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.07.019
Sponsors:
Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Although cooperation is a fundamental aspect of our society, it has been
a longstanding puzzle in biological and social sciences because
cooperation is often costly to those who practice it while others
benefit. Recent studies have shown that natural selection favors
cooperation when cooperators are more likely to interact with each other
than with defectors, an effect called positive assortment. It might be
that, in the real world, mobility makes positive assortment possible.
However, to our knowledge, the coevolutionary dynamics of cooperation
and mobility remains poorly understood. In this study, using an
individual-based model where both cooperativeness and mobility are
evolved under natural selection, we demonstrate that the coevolutionary
dynamics results in the oscillation of the frequency of cooperation as
long as the benefit-to-cost ratio of cooperation is large. This finding
suggests that natural selection favors or fine-tunes a mobility rate by
which cooperation can be maintained dynamically in the form of an
oscillation without any other high cognitive abilities such as
individual identification or memory of the past actions of other
individuals. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Tags
Social networks
Evolution
Public-goods games
Multilevel selection
Indirect reciprocity
Prisoners-dilemma
Heterogeneous populations
Environmental feedback
Structured
population
Neural basis