Emergent cooperative behavior in transient compartments

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal multilevel selection model demonstrating how transient compartments can promote cooperation through inter-group competition and size diversity, shedding light on mechanisms underlying multicellularity evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model combining game theory and population dynamics with transient compartments to explain cooperation emergence.

Findings

Cooperation can persist despite intra-group interactions favoring defectors.

Inter-group competition and size diversity support cooperative behavior.

Transient compartments facilitate the maintenance of diversity among strategies.

Abstract

We introduce a minimal model of multilevel selection on structured populations, considering the interplay between game theory and population dynamics. Through a bottleneck process, finite groups are formed with cooperators and defectors sampled from an infinite pool. After the fragmentation, these transient compartments grow until the carrying capacity is attained. Eventually, all compartments are merged, well mixed and the whole process is repeated. We show that cooperators, even if interacting only through mean-field intra-group interactions that favor defectors, may perform well because of the inter-group competition and the size diversity among the compartments. These cycles of isolation and coalescence may therefore be important in maintaining diversity among different species or strategies and may help to understand the underlying mechanisms of the scaffolding processes in the transition to multicellularity.