Yamauchi Atsushi
Center for Ecological Research, Kyoto University, Hirano 2-509-3, Otsu 520-2113, Japan.
J Theor Biol. 2024 Oct 7;593:111910. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2024.111910. Epub 2024 Jul 18.
Labor division is a phenomenon observed across various biological contexts, including examples such as the differentiation between germ/somatic cells in multicellular organisms and the division between reproductive/worker individuals within social animal groups. In such cases, certain members contribute to tasks that enhance the viability of the entire group, even if this requires a reduction in their individual reproductive efforts. Given that group members have the potential to adopt varying contribution levels, a comprehensive analysis of the evolution becomes intricate due to the problem's high dimensionality. In this paper, I introduce a novel method for analyzing the evolution of the distribution of contribution levels to group viability, with a particular formulation centered on the success of clonal strains. The analysis demonstrates that the curvature of the fecundity function in relation to contributions to the group plays a pivotal role in determining the occurrence of labor division between reproductive and non-reproductive tasks, aligning in part with results from prior research. Furthermore, I extend this analysis to encompass contributions to multiple categories of tasks for group viability. My findings indicate that investments in non-reproductive tasks are selected based on the average contributions for each task, with individual variation playing a less significant role as long as average values remain consistent. Additionally, I explore the impact of group size and relatedness within the group on labor division. The results highlight that increases in group size and relatedness have a positive influence on the evolution of cooperation, although their effects are not directly tied to labor division itself.
分工是一种在各种生物学背景中都能观察到的现象，包括多细胞生物中生殖细胞/体细胞之间的分化以及社会性动物群体中生殖个体/工蚁个体之间的分工等例子。在这些情况下，某些成员承担有助于提高整个群体生存能力的任务，即便这需要减少它们自身的繁殖努力。鉴于群体成员有可能采取不同的贡献水平，由于该问题的高维度性，对其进化的全面分析变得错综复杂。在本文中，我介绍了一种新颖的方法来分析对群体生存能力贡献水平分布的进化，其特定公式以克隆菌株的成功为核心。分析表明，繁殖力函数相对于对群体贡献的曲率在决定生殖任务和非生殖任务之间分工的出现方面起着关键作用，这在一定程度上与先前研究的结果一致。此外，我将此分析扩展到涵盖对群体生存能力的多类任务的贡献。我的研究结果表明，对非生殖任务的投入是根据每项任务的平均贡献来选择的，只要平均值保持一致，个体差异的作用就较小。此外，我还探讨了群体规模和群体内亲缘关系对分工的影响。结果突出表明，群体规模和亲缘关系的增加对合作的进化有积极影响，尽管它们的影响并非直接与分工本身相关。
