Positive effects of multiple gene control on the spread of altruism by group selection

Abstract

To cite this version:Tomáš Kulich, Jaroslav Flegr. Positive effects of multiple gene control on the spread of altruism by group selection.Journal of Theoretical Biology, Elsevier, 2011, 284 (1), pp. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. AbstractThe origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. Under certain conditions, the strength of group selection, i.e., the selection driven by competition between populations, can surpass the strength of individual selection; however, such conditions seem to be relatively strict and probably do not hold in many natural systems where the altruistic behavior was observed. It was suggested recently that chances for altruistic behavior to spread highly increase when it is controlled not by a single gene but by multiple independent genes substitutable in their effects on the phenotype of the individual. Here we confirm the original verbal model by numerical modeling of the spread of altruistic/selfish alleles in a metapopulation consisting of partly isolated groups of organisms (demes) interconnected by migration. We have shown that altruistic behavior coded by multiple substitutable genes can stably coexist with selfish behavior, even under relatively high mutation and migration rates, i.e., under such conditions where altruistic behavior coded by a single gene is quickly outcompeted in a metapopulation.

Microevolutionary, macroevolutionary, ecological and taxonomical implications of punctuational theories of adaptive evolution

“…Thus populations can compete for the greatest average fitness of their members; those that have the greatest proportion of the relevant alleles, resulting in the greatest number of altruists being formed (emerging by chance), will win in this competition. The models show that group and inter-species selection can occur in nature in favor of altruistic traits (because the percentage proportion of alleles in the population is inherited from one generation to the next) and its results cannot be cancelled out by individual selection because the trait itself, altruistic behavior, is not inherited [11]. …”