Evolving Social Behavior in Adverse Environments

Abstract

Abstract. Cooperative behaviors are pervasive in the natural world. How organisms evolve stable cooperative strategies, specifically how selection can favor such costly behaviors, is a difficult problem for which several theories exist. In this work, we use digital evolution to explore the evolution of the production of a public resource that enables populations of organisms to survive in an adverse environment. Kin selection and limited dispersal are shown to promote cooperative acts, and evolved organisms stave off invasion by cheaters and survive in increasingly-adverse environments. Further, we observe how populations react to the disappearance and later re-emergence of adversity in the environment.

Collective Multi-Agent Navigation Model Based on Bacterial Quorum Sensing

“…This paper is supported on various works related to research focused on growth and development of bacteria, both from the biological point of view and the point of view of engineering (Karafyllidis, 2011), (Wiedermann, 2011), (Besozzi, Cazzaniga, Mauri, y Pescini, 2011), (Shen y Zhou, 2010), (Niu, Fan, Tan, Rao, y Li, 2010), (Taylor, Tinsley, Wang, Huang, y Showalter, 2009). From the latter field, a lot of research is seen in search and optimization processes, specifically in computational intelligence, where the growth, development and interaction between bacteria offers interesting behavioral models (Zang, He, y Ye, 2010), (Cho y Kim, 2011), (Gómez y Rodríguez, 2011), (Goni, Redondo, Arroyo, y Castellanos, 2011), (Connelly y McKinley, 2011). In particular, it comes to have a structure capable of modeling individuals, groups of individuals, and their communication processes .…”

Resource abundance promotes the evolution of public goods cooperation

“…We adopted the concept of a virtual biofilm from previous work [6] as the model for our experiments. As in nature, an organism's membership in a virtual biofilm provided it with some benefit that it could not easily obtain in a free or planktonic state.…”

“…The short generation times of these organisms make evolutionary-scale studies feasible. Computational models of these systems are also frequently used, providing researchers complete environmental control and access to each organism [6,8,19].…”