Games of multicellularity
Kamran Kaveh, Carl Veller, Martin A. Nowak

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new population structure inspired by simple multicellular organisms, analyzing evolutionary game dynamics within cell complexes and deriving conditions for strategy selection, extending previous models to include frequency-dependent interactions.
Contribution
It presents a novel multicellular-inspired population structure and derives exact conditions for strategy selection, generalizing the sigma condition to complex sizes beyond two.
Findings
Exact conditions for strategy favorability derived for all complex sizes at weak selection.
Main results extend the sigma condition symmetry to multicellular structures.
Model applies to various two-strategy games like prisoner's dilemma and hawk-dove.
Abstract
Evolutionary game dynamics are often studied in the context of different population structures. Here we propose a new population structure that is inspired by simple multicellular life forms. In our model, cells reproduce but can stay together after reproduction. They reach complexes of a certain size, n, before producing single cells again. The cells within a complex derive payoff from an evolutionary game by interacting with each other. The reproductive rate of cells is proportional to their payoff. We consider all two-strategy games. We study deterministic evolutionary dynamics with mutations, and derive exact conditions for selection to favor one strategy over another. Our main result has the same symmetry as the well-known sigma condition, which has been proven for stochastic game dynamics and weak selection. For a maximum complex size of n=2 our result holds for any intensity of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
