Cooperators overcome migration dilemma through synchronization

Abstract

Synchronization, cooperation, and chaos are ubiquitous phenomena in nature. In a population composed of many distinct groups of individuals playing the prisoner's dilemma game, there exists a migration dilemma: No cooperator would migrate to a group playing the prisoner's dilemma game lest it should be exploited by a defector; but unless the migration takes place, there is no chance of the entire population's cooperator-fraction to increase. Employing a randomly rewired coupled map lattice of chaotic replicator maps, modelling replication-selection evolutionary game dynamics, we demonstrate that the cooperators-evolving in synchrony-overcome the migration dilemma to proliferate across the population when altruism is mildly incentivized making few of the demes play the leader game.