Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Feb 8;17(2):e1008703. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008703. eCollection 2021 Feb.
As cooperation incurs a cost to the cooperator for others to benefit, its evolution seems to contradict natural selection. How evolution has resolved this obstacle has been among the most intensely studied questions in evolutionary theory in recent decades. Here, we show that having a choice between different public resources provides a simple mechanism for cooperation to flourish. Such a mechanism can be at work in many biological or social contexts where individuals can form different groups or join different institutions to perform a collective action task, or when they can choose between collective actions with different profitability. As a simple evolutionary model suggests, defectors tend to join the highest quality resource in such a context. This allows cooperators to survive and out-compete defectors by sheltering in a lower quality resource. Cooperation is maximized, however, when the qualities of the two highest quality resources are similar, and thus, they are almost interchangeable.
由于合作会让合作者为他人的利益付出代价，因此它的进化似乎与自然选择相悖。进化是如何克服这一障碍的，这是近几十年来进化理论中研究最激烈的问题之一。在这里，我们表明，在不同的公共资源之间进行选择为合作的繁荣提供了一个简单的机制。这种机制可以在许多生物或社会环境中发挥作用，在这些环境中，个体可以形成不同的群体或加入不同的机构来执行集体行动任务，或者当他们可以在不同盈利性的集体行动之间进行选择时。正如一个简单的进化模型所表明的那样，在这种情况下，叛徒往往会加入质量最高的资源。这使得合作者能够通过在质量较低的资源中避难来生存并战胜叛徒。然而，当两种质量最高的资源的质量相似时，合作达到最大化，因此它们几乎可以互换。
