No Arabic abstract
We study the coevolutionary dynamics of the diversity of phenotype expression and the evolution of cooperation in the Prisoners Dilemma game. Rather than pre-assigning zero-or-one interaction rate, we diversify the rate of interaction by associating it with the phenotypes shared in common. Individuals each carry a set of potentially expressible phenotypes and expresses a certain number of phenotypes at a cost proportional to the number. The number of expressed phenotypes and thus the rate of interaction is an evolvable trait. Our results show that nonnegligible cost of expressing phenotypes restrains phenotype expression, and the evolutionary race mainly proceeds on between cooperative strains and defective strains who express a very few phenotypes. It pays for cooperative strains to express a very few phenotypes. Though such a low level of expression weakens reciprocity between cooperative strains, it decelerates rate of interaction between cooperative strains and defective strains to a larger degree, leading to the predominance of cooperative strains over defective strains. We also find that evolved diversity of phenotype expression can occasionally destabilize due to the invasion of defective mutants, implying that cooperation and diversity of phenotype expression can mutually reinforce each other. Therefore, our results provide new insights into better understanding the coevolution of cooperation and the diversity of phenotype expression.
The promotion of cooperation on spatial lattices is an important issue in evolutionary game theory. This effect clearly depends on the update rule: it diminishes with stochastic imitative rules whereas it increases with unconditional imitation. To study the transition between both regimes, we propose a new evolutionary rule, which stochastically combines unconditional imitation with another imitative rule. We find that, surprinsingly, in many social dilemmas this rule yields higher cooperative levels than any of the two original ones. This nontrivial effect occurs because the basic rules induce a separation of timescales in the microscopic processes at cluster interfaces. The result is robust in the space of 2x2 symmetric games, on regular lattices and on scale-free networks.
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 subject to noise of multiplicative nature. The special properties of multiplicative noise as opposed to additive noise have been noticed for a long while. Even though apparently and formally the difference between free additive vs. multiplicative random walks consists in just a move from normal to log-normal distributions, in practice the implications are much more far reaching. While in an additive context the emergence and survival of cooperation requires special conditions (especially some level of reward, punishment, reciprocity), we find that in the multiplicative random context the emergence of cooperation is much more natural and effective. We study the various implications of this observation and its applications in various contexts.
Spatial structure is known to have an impact on the evolution of cooperation, and so it has been intensively studied during recent years. Previous work has shown the relevance of some features, such as the synchronicity of the updating, the clustering of the network or the influence of the update rule. This has been done, however, for concrete settings with particular games, networks and update rules, with the consequence that some contradictions have arisen and a general understanding of these topics is missing in the broader context of the space of 2x2 games. To address this issue, we have performed a systematic and exhaustive simulation in the different degrees of freedom of the problem. In some cases, we generalize previous knowledge to the broader context of our study and explain the apparent contradictions. In other cases, however, our conclusions refute what seems to be established opinions in the field, as for example the robustness of the effect of spatial structure against changes in the update rule, or offer new insights into the subject, e.g. the relation between the intensity of selection and the asymmetry between the effects on games with mixed equilibria.
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been revealed to play a key role in the emergence of cooperation. Individuals, however, are typically assumed to be passive in the information spreading. Here we assume that individuals are active to spread the information via self-recommendation. Individuals with higher intensities of self-recommendation are likely to have more neighbors. We find that i) eloquent cooperators are necessary to promote cooperation; ii) individuals need to be open to the self-recommendation to enhance cooperation level; iii) the cost-to-benefit ratio should be smaller than one minus the ratio between self-recommendation intensities of defector and cooperator, which qualitatively measures the viscosity of the population. Our results highlight the importance of active information spreading on cooperation.
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of cooperation has traditionally been studied for well-mixed populations under the framework of evolutionary game theory, and more recently for structured populations using evolutionary graph theory. The population structures arising due to cellular arrangement in tissues however are dynamic and thus cannot be accurately represented by either of these frameworks. In this work we compare the conditions for cooperative success in an epithelium modelled using evolutionary graph theory, to those in a mechanical model of an epithelium =- the Voronoi tessellation model. Crucially, in this latter model cells are able to move, and birth and death are not spatially coupled. We calculate fixation probabilities in the Voronoi tessellation model through simulation and an approximate analytic technique and show that this leads to stronger promotion of cooperation in comparison with the evolutionary graph theory model.