Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection.

By Arne Traulsen, Martin A. Nowak. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006

910 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a minimalist stochastic model of multilevel (or group) selection. A population is subdivided into groups. Individuals interact with other members of the group in an evolutionary game that determines their fitness. Individuals reproduce, and offspring are added to the same group. If a group reaches a certain size, it can split into two. Faster reproducing individuals lead to larger groups that split more often. In our model, higher-level selection emerges as a byproduct of individual reproduction and population structure. We derive a fundamental condition for the evolution of cooperation by group selection: if b/c > 1 + n/m, then group selection favors cooperation. The parameters b and c denote the benefit and cost of the altruistic act, whereas n and m denote the maximum group size and the number of groups. The model can be extended to more than two levels of selection and to include migration.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2f8c370a94f83df10f445708b94f291220df321

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary games on graphs (2006, background): “weak selection limit for low values of q. The model was extended by allowing migration between the groups with some probability. Using the payoﬀ matrix (129) and considering the ﬁxation probabilities Traulsen and Nowak (2006) have shown that cooperators are favored over defectors if the beneﬁt-to-co”
Societal threat and cultural variation in the strength of social norms: An evolutionary basis (2015, neutral): “…cooperative behavior (e.g., Bowles, 2009; Nowak, 2006), our model is designed to capture a broad array of different types of threat and shows evolution toward strong cooperation or coordination norms without the requirement for group selection (Bowles, 2006; Henrich, 2004; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006).”
Proactive and reactive helping: Contrasting the positive consequences of different forms of helping (2013, background): “For example, Traulsen and Nowak (2006) showed that a strategy of defection may be optimal for individuals in groups which contain both cooperators and defectors.”
Social semantics: how useful has group selection been? (2008, background): “…where group selection can explain cooperation in a case where kin selection is not important (e.g. Wilson, 1975; Colwell, 1981; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Gintis, 2000; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis et al., 2003; Wilson & Hölldobler, 2005; Nowak, 2006; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006; Taylor & Nowak, 2007).”
Coevolutionary games - A mini review (2009, neutral): “…2008), indirect reciprocity (Nowak and Sigmund, 1998a,b; Fehr and Gächter, 2002; Brandt and Sigmund, 2004; Nowak and Sigmund, 2005; Tanimoto, 2007c) and group selection (Dugatkin and Mesterton-Gibbons, 1996; Traulsen and Nowak, 2006; Traulsen et al., 2008), as recently reviewed in (Nowak, 2006b).”
Sixteen common misconceptions about the evolution of cooperation in humans (2011, background): “…hotly debated, completely wrong, or that there is some ulterior motive for the lack of attention given to it (Baschetti, 2007; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Traulsen & Nowak, 2006; Wilson & Wilson, 2007) This misconception is encapsulated in phrases such as " I believe that this is a hold-over of US…”
Evolution of parochial altruism by multilevel selection (2011, methodology): “We have thus two models of multilevel selection: one in which successful groups split, so that assortment is the driving force of selection (Traulsen and Nowak, 2006; Lehmann et al., 2007), and one in which conflict and assortment interact to determine between-group selection.”
Evolutionary dynamics of group interactions on structured populations: a review (2013, background): “The concept of bipartiteness [103,105], for example, appears to be related to multi-level selection [107,152], which, however, was so far considered without explicit network structure describing the interactions among players.”
One Giant Leap: How Insects Achieved Altruism and Colonial Life (2008, background): “Although multilevel selection has been viewed as paramount in the origin of altruism since Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871; see, e.g., Traulsen and Nowak 2006 ), and although group selection must by definition occur, group selection is still alluded to by many writers as a non-Darwinian…”