Competitive environments sustain costly altruism with negligible assortment of interactions.

ABSTRACT: Competition hinders the evolution of altruism amongst kin when beneficiaries gain at the expense of competing relatives. Altruism is consequently deemed to require stronger kin selection, or trait-selected synergies, or elastic population regulation, to counter this effect. Here we contest the view that competition puts any such demands on altruism. In ecologically realistic scenarios, competition influences both altruism and defection. We show how environments that pit defectors against each other allow strong altruism to evolve even in populations with negligible kin structure and no synergies. Competition amongst defectors presents relative advantages to altruism in the simplest games between altruists and defectors, and the most generic models of altruistic phenotypes or genotypes inva

SUBMITTER: Doncaster CP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3789156 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature