Plasticity facilitates sustainable growth in the commons

Abstract

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public good, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the shared resource (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although this appears a limitation, we show here how four heuristics lead to sustainable growth when coupled to specific ecological constraints. The two simplest ones—contribute permanently or switch stochastically between contributing or not—are first shown to bring sustainability when the public good efficiently promotes growth. If efficiency declines and the commons is structured in small groups, the most effective strategy resides in contributing only when a majority of individuals are also contributors. In contrast, when group size becomes large, the most effective behaviour follows a minimal-effort rule: contribute only when it is strictly necessary. Both plastic strategies are observed in natural scenarios across scales that present them as relevant social motifs for the sustainable management of public goods.

The Evolutionary Resilience of Distributed Cellular Computing

“…One of the possibilities is the presence of an interplay between cellular information processing and the eco-evolutionary dynamics that characterize the cellular population, as presented in recent works [2,4]. Proper cellular informationprocessing could minimize the risk of cheaters spreading when coupled to specific ecological constraints.…”

“…Results in [2] (and presented in Figure 3) show that the optimal kinds of cellular information-processing depend on the ecological constraints (the size of the colonies) and on the efficiency of the public good. For low efficiency of the public good (and sufficiently small colony size) the optimal cellular decisionmaking consists in withholding production of public goods when cheaters are detected above a certain threshold (this is called positive plasticity).…”

“…The emergence (by mutation) of free-riders (cheaters) that do not contribute but use the accessible public good leads to the demographic collapse of the population. The authors also found that low densities (following the spreading of cheaters and lack of public good) can facilitate the recover of cooperation (i.e., of producer cells) due to a phenomenon called Simpson's paradox [21], but on the other hand they may also lead to demographic extinctions [2]. The risk of extinction can be minimized when the cells use proper cellular information-processing, whereby the amount investment in the public good can be adjusted in response to the structure of the population, i.e.…”

“…This possibility was investigated computationally by Cavaliere and Poyatos in [2]. In this paper, the authors analyze communities of cells structured in colonies that recurrently are recreated and whose growth depends on a public good (as in the standard Hamilton's group model [21]).…”

Cooperators trade off ecological resilience and evolutionary stability in public goods games

“…Interestingly, theory [10,11], agent-based simulations [17] and experiment [16] indicate that the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of public goods genes may occur on similar timescales, and they are dynamically coupled in a feedback loop. Given this coupling, it is pertinent to ask whether the resilience to evolutionary challenges and the resilience to demographic perturbations are also coupled, and whether there exist any constraints that make it easy or difficult to simultaneously maximize the resilience to both evolutionary and ecological challenges.…”