Mobility can promote the evolution of cooperation via emergent self-assortment dynamics.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of costly cooperation, where cooperators pay a personal cost to benefit others, requires that cooperators interact more frequently with other cooperators. This condition, called positive assortment, is known to occur in spatially-structured viscous populations, where individuals typically have low mobility and limited dispersal. However many social organisms across taxa, from cells and bacteria, to birds, fish and ungulates, are mobile, and live in populations with considerable inter-group mixing. In the absence of information regarding others' traits or conditional strategies, such mixing may inhibit assortment and limit the potential for cooperation to evolve. Here we employ spatially-explicit individual-based evolutionary simulations to incorporate costs and benefits of tw

SUBMITTER: Joshi J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5607214 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature