Department of Mathematics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 19;8(8):e72043. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0072043. eCollection 2013.
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on linear public goods games. This emphasis has led to the conclusion that even modest levels of migration would pose a serious problem to the spread of altruism through population viscosity in group structured populations. Here we challenge this conclusion, by analyzing evolution in a framework which allows for complex group interactions and random migration among groups. We conclude that contingent forms of strong altruism that benefits equally all group members, regardless of kinship and without greenbeard effects, can spread when rare under realistic group sizes and levels of migration, due to the assortment of genes resulting only from population viscosity. Our analysis combines group-centric and gene-centric perspectives, allows for arbitrary strength of selection, and leads to extensions of Hamilton's rule for the spread of altruistic alleles, applicable under broad conditions.
自然选择如何允许合作行为的扩散，长期以来一直被视为进化生物学中的一个核心问题。大多数文献都集中在个体之间的相互作用和线性公共物品博弈上。这种重点导致的结论是，即使是适度的迁移水平，也会对通过群体粘性在群体结构种群中传播利他主义造成严重问题。在这里，我们通过分析允许复杂群体相互作用和群体间随机迁移的框架来挑战这一结论。我们的结论是，当在现实的群体规模和迁移水平下，稀有偶然形式的对所有群体成员都有利的强烈利他主义，由于仅由群体粘性产生的基因组合，会在没有亲缘关系和没有“绿胡子效应”的情况下传播。我们的分析结合了以群体为中心和以基因为中心的观点，允许任意选择强度，并导致汉密尔顿规则的扩展，适用于广泛的条件下利他等位基因的传播。
