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The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups

BACKGROUND: Although selection favors exploitative competition within groups, a group of hypercompetitive individuals may be less productive than a cooperative group. When competition is costly for group fitness, among-group selection can favor groups with 'policing' individuals who reduce...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Brandvain, Yaniv, Wade, Michael J
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2007
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2222249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17961250
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-7-203
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author Brandvain, Yaniv
Wade, Michael J
author_facet Brandvain, Yaniv
Wade, Michael J
author_sort Brandvain, Yaniv
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Although selection favors exploitative competition within groups, a group of hypercompetitive individuals may be less productive than a cooperative group. When competition is costly for group fitness, among-group selection can favor groups with 'policing' individuals who reduce within-group competition at a cost to their own fitness, or groups of individuals who restrain their competitive intensity ('self policing'). We examine these possibilities in a series of explicit population-genetic models. RESULTS: By comparing results from models of half and full sib structured populations, we find that increased relatedness increases the strength of among-group selection against competition genotypes, and increases the strength of among group selection favoring policing genotypes. However, the strength of selection favoring costly policing behavior also increases with increased levels of competition. When levels of competition and policing feedback on one another, groups with lower levels of relatedness can favor higher levels of costly policing. CONCLUSION: The result of the joint selection on policing and competition leads to results different from those based on the evolution of policing alone. Our model makes 'long term' predictions equivalent to those of optimization models, but we also show the existence of protected polymorphisms of police and civilians, as well as competitors and non-competitors.
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spelling pubmed-22222492008-02-02 The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups Brandvain, Yaniv Wade, Michael J BMC Evol Biol Research Article BACKGROUND: Although selection favors exploitative competition within groups, a group of hypercompetitive individuals may be less productive than a cooperative group. When competition is costly for group fitness, among-group selection can favor groups with 'policing' individuals who reduce within-group competition at a cost to their own fitness, or groups of individuals who restrain their competitive intensity ('self policing'). We examine these possibilities in a series of explicit population-genetic models. RESULTS: By comparing results from models of half and full sib structured populations, we find that increased relatedness increases the strength of among-group selection against competition genotypes, and increases the strength of among group selection favoring policing genotypes. However, the strength of selection favoring costly policing behavior also increases with increased levels of competition. When levels of competition and policing feedback on one another, groups with lower levels of relatedness can favor higher levels of costly policing. CONCLUSION: The result of the joint selection on policing and competition leads to results different from those based on the evolution of policing alone. Our model makes 'long term' predictions equivalent to those of optimization models, but we also show the existence of protected polymorphisms of police and civilians, as well as competitors and non-competitors. BioMed Central 2007-10-25 /pmc/articles/PMC2222249/ /pubmed/17961250 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-7-203 Text en Copyright © 2007 Brandvain and Wade; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Brandvain, Yaniv
Wade, Michael J
The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title_full The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title_fullStr The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title_full_unstemmed The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title_short The evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
title_sort evolution of competition and policing: opposing selection within and among groups
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2222249/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17961250
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-7-203
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