Community-level cohesion without cooperation
Mikhail Tikhonov

TL;DR
This paper introduces a minimal theoretical model showing that community survival during coalescence depends on community-level fitness rather than individual species performance, highlighting cohesion without cooperation.
Contribution
It formalizes a community-level perspective where cohesion arises from division of labor without requiring cooperation, extending MacArthur's model to community interactions.
Findings
Community survival is predicted by community-level fitness.
Cohesion can emerge without cooperation.
Model applies to microbial ecosystems.
Abstract
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ("coalescence") as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level "fitness" of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. The model presented here allows formalizing a macroscopic perspective whereby a community harboring organisms at varying abundances becomes equivalent to a single organism expressing genes at different levels. While most natural communities do not satisfy the strict criteria of multicellularity developed by multi-level selection theory, the effective cohesion described here is a generic consequence…
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