Evolutionary dynamics on any population structure

By Benjamin Allen, Gábor Lippner, Yu-Ting Chen, Babak Fotouhi, Naghmeh Momeni, Shing-Tung Yau, Martin A. Nowak. Nature, 2016

521 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a population can affect which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations remains difficult. Mathematical results are known for special structures in which all individuals have the same number of neighbours. The general case, in which the number of neighbours can vary, has remained open. For arbitrary selection intensity, the problem is in a computational complexity class that suggests there is no efficient algorithm. Whether a simple solution for weak selection exists has remained unanswered. Here we provide a solution for weak selection that applies to any graph or network. Our method relies on calculating the coalescence times of random walks. We evaluate large numbers of diverse population structures for their propensity to favour cooperation. We study how small changes in population structure—graph surgery—affect evolutionary outcomes. We find that cooperation flourishes most in societies that are based on strong pairwise ties.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4da77106472d876b1da560b840dd5a5dce6739f8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Statistical physics of human cooperation (2017, result): “A closer inspection of the theory reveals a potential explanation for this mismatch: one particularly influential line of theoretical work found that cooperation is only evolutionary stable on networks when the benefit-to-cost ratio of cooperation is larger than the average number of network neighbo”