Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University, Mlynská dolina, Bratislava, Slovak Republic.
J Theor Biol. 2011 Sep 7;284(1):1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.05.017. Epub 2011 May 23.
The origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. Under certain conditions, the strength of group selection, i.e., the selection driven by competition between populations, can surpass the strength of individual selection; however, such conditions seem to be relatively strict and probably do not hold in many natural systems where the altruistic behavior was observed. It was suggested recently that chances for altruistic behavior to spread highly increase when it is controlled not by a single gene but by multiple independent genes substitutable in their effects on the phenotype of the individual. Here we confirm the original verbal model by numerical modeling of the spread of altruistic/selfish alleles in a metapopulation consisting of partly isolated groups of organisms (demes) interconnected by migration. We have shown that altruistic behavior coded by multiple substitutable genes can stably coexist with selfish behavior, even under relatively high mutation and migration rates, i.e., under such conditions where altruistic behavior coded by a single gene is quickly outcompeted in a metapopulation.
利他行为的起源长期以来一直是进化生物学学生的挑战。具有利他个体的种群比没有利他主义者的种群表现更好；然而，种群内的利他主义者比非利他主义者表现更差，并且由于个体选择，它们在种群中的流行度降低。在某些条件下，群体选择的强度，即由种群之间的竞争驱动的选择，可以超过个体选择的强度；然而，这种情况似乎相对严格，可能不适用于许多观察到利他行为的自然系统。最近有人提出，当利他行为不是由单个基因控制，而是由多个独立的基因控制，并且这些基因在个体表型上的作用可以相互替代时，利他行为传播的机会就会大大增加。在这里，我们通过对由部分隔离的生物群体（种群）组成的复合种群中利他/自私等位基因传播的数值建模，证实了原始的口头模型。我们表明，由多个可替代基因编码的利他行为可以与自私行为稳定共存，即使在相对较高的突变和迁移率下，即在一个复合种群中由单个基因编码的利他行为很快被淘汰的条件下也是如此。
