The Janus face of Darwinian competition

Abstract

Without competition, organisms would not evolve any meaningful physical or cognitive abilities. Competition can thus be understood as the driving force behind Darwinian evolution. But does this imply that more competitive environments necessarily evolve organisms with more sophisticated cognitive abilities than do less competitive environments? Or is there a tipping point at which competition does more harm than good? We examine the evolution of decision strategies among virtual agents performing a repetitive sampling task in three distinct environments. The environments differ in the degree to which the actions of a competitor can affect the fitness of the sampling agent, and in the variance of the sample. Under weak competition, agents evolve decision strategies that sample often and make accurate decisions, which not only improve their own fitness, but are good for the entire population. Under extreme competition, however, the dark side of the Janus face of Darwinian competition emerges: Agents are forced to sacrifice accuracy for speed and are prevented from sampling as often as higher variance in the environment would require. Modest competition is therefore a good driver for the evolution of cognitive abilities and of the population as a whole, whereas too much competition is devastating.

How School Climate Affects the Development of the Social and Emotional Skills of Underprivileged-Background Students—An Empirical Study Based on the SSES2019 Data

“…Darwinism argues that living creatures cannot evolve useful physiological structures and cognitive abilities without competition [ 41 ]. Modern education is characterized by a large scale.…”

To act fast or to bide time? Adaptive exploration under competitive pressure

“…This type of adaptation has also been found in strategic games in which groups of competitors converge to stable strategies as a result of experience, both over individual and evolutionary time-scales (Avrahami, Güth, Hertwig, Kareev, & Otsubo, 2013;Camerer, 2003;Rapoport, Stein, Parco, & Nicholas, 2003). A recent study by Hintze, Phillips, and Hertwig (2015) illustrates how a minimal exploration strategy emerges when extreme competition is a stable and recurrent property of the ecology. They conducted evolutionary simulations using tasks of a similar nature to the rivals-in-the-dark game, with varying levels of competitive pressure.…”

A Model for Brain Life History Evolution

“…For instance, 563 increasingly challenging environments favor large brains up to a point, so that 564 exceedingly challenging environments disfavor large brains. Thus, on the low end of 565 environmental difficulty, the prediction that increasingly challenging environments favor 566 large brains is consistent with ecological challenge hypotheses [21,38]; yet, on the high 567 end of environmental difficulty, the prediction that increasingly challenging 568 environments disfavor large brains is consistent with constraint hypotheses according to 569 which facilitation of environmental challenge favors larger brains [21,[83][84][85].…”

“…To analyze how selection affects the evolution of the allocation 81 strategy, we carry out an evolutionary invasion analysis (e.g., [31,[47][48][49]), and thus 82 consider that only two strategies can occur in the population, a mutant u and a resident 83 (wild-type) v allocation strategies. We thus seek to establish which strategy is resistant 84 to invasion by any alternative strategy taken from the set U of feasible allocation 85 strategies, and which thus provides a likely final point of evolution. From demographic 86 assumptions we make below, it is well established [43,[50][51][52] that an uninvadable 87 strategy u * satisfies 88 u * ∈ arg max u∈U R 0 (u, u * ),…”