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Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games

BACKGROUND: The origin and stability of cooperation is a hot topic in social and behavioural sciences. A complicated conundrum exists as defectors have an advantage over cooperators, whenever cooperation is costly so consequently, not cooperating pays off. In addition, the discovery that humans and...

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Autores principales: Boza, Gergely, Számadó, Szabolcs
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21044340
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-336
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author Boza, Gergely
Számadó, Szabolcs
author_facet Boza, Gergely
Számadó, Szabolcs
author_sort Boza, Gergely
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The origin and stability of cooperation is a hot topic in social and behavioural sciences. A complicated conundrum exists as defectors have an advantage over cooperators, whenever cooperation is costly so consequently, not cooperating pays off. In addition, the discovery that humans and some animal populations, such as lions, are polymorphic, where cooperators and defectors stably live together -- while defectors are not being punished--, is even more puzzling. Here we offer a novel explanation based on a Threshold Public Good Game (PGG) that includes the interaction of individual and group level selection, where individuals can contribute to multiple collective actions, in our model group hunting and group defense. RESULTS: Our results show that there are polymorphic equilibria in Threshold PGGs; that multi-level selection does not select for the most cooperators per group but selects those close to the optimum number of cooperators (in terms of the Threshold PGG). In particular for medium cost values division of labour evolves within the group with regard to the two types of cooperative actions (hunting vs. defense). Moreover we show evidence that spatial population structure promotes cooperation in multiple PGGs. We also demonstrate that these results apply for a wide range of non-linear benefit function types. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that cooperation can be stable in Threshold PGG, even when the proportion of so called free riders is high in the population. A fundamentally new mechanism is proposed how laggards, individuals that have a high tendency to defect during one specific group action can actually contribute to the fitness of the group, by playing part in an optimal resource allocation in Threshold Public Good Games. In general, our results show that acknowledging a multilevel selection process will open up novel explanations for collective actions.
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spelling pubmed-29899732010-12-13 Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games Boza, Gergely Számadó, Szabolcs BMC Evol Biol Research Article BACKGROUND: The origin and stability of cooperation is a hot topic in social and behavioural sciences. A complicated conundrum exists as defectors have an advantage over cooperators, whenever cooperation is costly so consequently, not cooperating pays off. In addition, the discovery that humans and some animal populations, such as lions, are polymorphic, where cooperators and defectors stably live together -- while defectors are not being punished--, is even more puzzling. Here we offer a novel explanation based on a Threshold Public Good Game (PGG) that includes the interaction of individual and group level selection, where individuals can contribute to multiple collective actions, in our model group hunting and group defense. RESULTS: Our results show that there are polymorphic equilibria in Threshold PGGs; that multi-level selection does not select for the most cooperators per group but selects those close to the optimum number of cooperators (in terms of the Threshold PGG). In particular for medium cost values division of labour evolves within the group with regard to the two types of cooperative actions (hunting vs. defense). Moreover we show evidence that spatial population structure promotes cooperation in multiple PGGs. We also demonstrate that these results apply for a wide range of non-linear benefit function types. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that cooperation can be stable in Threshold PGG, even when the proportion of so called free riders is high in the population. A fundamentally new mechanism is proposed how laggards, individuals that have a high tendency to defect during one specific group action can actually contribute to the fitness of the group, by playing part in an optimal resource allocation in Threshold Public Good Games. In general, our results show that acknowledging a multilevel selection process will open up novel explanations for collective actions. BioMed Central 2010-11-02 /pmc/articles/PMC2989973/ /pubmed/21044340 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-336 Text en Copyright ©2010 Boza and Számadó; 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
Boza, Gergely
Számadó, Szabolcs
Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title_full Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title_fullStr Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title_full_unstemmed Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title_short Beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
title_sort beneficial laggards: multilevel selection, cooperative polymorphism and division of labour in threshold public good games
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21044340
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-336
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