High cost enhances cooperation through the interplay between evolution and self-organisation

Abstract

BackgroundCooperation is ubiquitous in biological systems, yet its evolution is a long lasting evolutionary problem. A general and intuitive result from theoretical models of cooperative behaviour is that cooperation decreases when its costs are higher, because selfish individuals gain selective advantage.ResultsContrary to this intuition, we show that cooperation can increase with higher costs. We analyse a minimal model where individuals live on a lattice and evolve the degree of cooperation. We find that a feedback establishes between the evolutionary dynamics of public good production and the spatial self-organisation of the population. The evolutionary dynamics lead to the speciation of a cooperative and a selfish lineage. The ensuing spatial self-organisation automatically diversifies the selection pressure on the two lineages. This enables selfish individuals to successfully invade cooperators at the expenses of their autonomous replication, and cooperators to increase public good production while expanding in the empty space left behind by cheaters. We show that this emergent feedback leads to higher degrees of cooperation when costs are higher.ConclusionsAn emergent feedback between evolution and self-organisation leads to high degrees of cooperation at high costs, under simple and general conditions. We propose this as a general explanation for the evolution of cooperative behaviours under seemingly prohibitive conditions.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-016-0600-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Insuperable problems of the genetic code initially emerging in an RNA world

“…The most extensive work on this topic has been conducted by Hogeweg and colleagues, starting with studies of hypercycles (Boerlijst and Hogeweg, 1991; 1995) and culminating most recently in treatments of parasitism (Colizzi and Hogeweg 2016a) and the evolutionary significance of high-cost cooperation (Colizzi and Hogeweg 2016b). Related studies, of paramount significance for our current undertaking, is the work of Füchslin & McCaskill (2001) and Markowitz et al (2006) on the evolution of cell-free genetic coding in gene-replicase-translatase (GRT) systems.…”

Insuperable problems of the genetic code initially emerging in an RNA World

“…As Turing (1952) first showed in relational to molecular systems, elementary reaction--diffusion coupling can result in extraordinary spatio--temporal ordering, effects which rescue some intricately cooperative chemical systems from extinction. The most extensive work on this topic has been conducted by Hogeweg and colleagues, starting with studies of hypercycles (Boerlijst and Hogeweg, 1991;1995) and culminating most recently in treatments of parasitism (Colizzi and Hogeweg 2016a) and the evolutionary significance of high--cost cooperation (Colizzi and Hogeweg 2016b). Related studies, of paramount significance for our current undertaking, is the work of Füchslin & McCaskill (2001) and Markowitz et al (2006) on the evolution of cell-free genetic coding in gene--replicase--translatase (GRT) systems.…”

Microbial expansion-collision dynamics promote cooperation and coexistence on surfaces

“…Consequently, genetic diversity is lost at colony frontiers, leading to a two-dimensional patterning of colonies into genetically distinct, pie-wedge-shaped sectors. This eco-evolutionary dynamic facilitates a number of interesting phenomena, such as genetic "surfing" of deleterious mutations, inhibition of spatial spread of obligate mutualists, and selection for cooperation (Hallatschek et al 2007;Excoffier and Ray 2008;Nelson 2008, 2010;Van Dyken et al 2013;Muller et al 2014;Colizzi and Hogeweg 2016). Cooperation is favored in this setting because random genetic drift increases genetic relatedness at colony boundaries, allowing strong positive genetic assortment that targets cooperative benefits to cooperators, while depriving defectors access to cooperative goods, and also allowing cooperator-rich sectors to outpace and overtake neighboring defector sectors in a "survival of the fastest" (Van Dyken et al 2013).…”