It takes grouping and cooperation to get sociality

Veelen, Matthijs van; García, Julián; Avilés, Leticia

doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.02.043

Cited by 27 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Similarly, individuals may have genetically encoded strategies to disperse once group size becomes too large or too small. It is plausible that a heritable group size preference could co-evolve with helping (Avilés, 2002;Avilés, Fletcher & Cutter, 2004; van Veelen, Biological Reviews (2016) 000-000 © 2016 Cambridge Philosophical Society García & Avilés, 2010;Powers, Penn & Watson, 2011). This can even lead to a runaway process where selection results in decreased group size, since this increases the indirect benefits of helping, which then further favours a reduction of group size .…”

Section: Endogenous Group Sizesmentioning

confidence: 99%

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

Powers

Lehmann

2016

Biological Reviews

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Understanding the evolution of sociality in humans and other species requires understanding how selection on social behaviour varies with group size. However, the effects of group size are frequently obscured in the theoretical literature, which often makes assumptions that are at odds with empirical findings. In particular, mechanisms are suggested as supporting large-scale cooperation when they would in fact rapidly become ineffective with increasing group size. Here we review the literature on the evolution of helping behaviours (cooperation and altruism), and frame it using a simple synthetic model that allows us to delineate how the three main components of the selection pressure on helping must vary with increasing group size. The first component is the marginal benefit of helping to group members, which determines both direct fitness benefits to the actor and indirect fitness benefits to recipients. While this is often assumed to be independent of group size, marginal benefits are in practice likely to be maximal at intermediate group sizes for many types of collective action problems, and will eventually become very small in large groups due to the law of decreasing marginal returns. The second component is the response of social partners on the past play of an actor, which underlies conditional behaviour under repeated social interactions. We argue that under realistic conditions on the transmission of information in a population, this response on past play decreases rapidly with increasing group size so that reciprocity alone (whether direct, indirect, or generalised) cannot sustain cooperation in very large groups. The final component is the relatedness between actor and recipient, which, according to the rules of inheritance, again decreases rapidly with increasing group size. These results explain why helping behaviours in very large social groups are limited to cases where the number of reproducing individuals is small, as in social insects, or where there are social institutions that can promote (possibly through sanctioning) large-scale cooperation, as in human societies. Finally, we discuss how individually devised institutions can foster the transition from small-scale to large-scale cooperative groups in human evolution.

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Section: Endogenous Group Sizesmentioning

confidence: 99%

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

Powers

Lehmann

2016

Biological Reviews

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“…Traits that affect, for example, local adaptation, kin recognition, adhesion, speed of movement, and perception of environmental cues ensure assortment among cooperating types (Aviles 2002, Garcia & De Monte 2013, Garcia et al 2014, Guttal & Couzin 2010, Jiang et al 1998, Mehdiabadi et al 2006, Ostrowski et al 2008, van Veelen et al 2010. For instance, cell adhesion plays a central role in establishing tissuelevel functionality, cell segregation, and sorting both in cancer and during development (Friedl & Gilmour 2009, Newman 2012.…”

Section: Before the Transition: Within-level Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving Conflicts During the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellular Life

Rainey

Monte

2014

Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst.

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The evolution of multicellular life from unicellular ancestral types involves a hierarchical shift in the level at which selection operates. The shift, from cells to collectives, depends on the emergence of Darwinian properties at the level of nascent collectives. However, from the very earliest phaseseven before the emergence of higher-level Darwinian properties-the stage is set for the evolution of conflict. Here we consider the range of ways by which cooperation and conflict manifest at different levels of biological organization. We give prominence to the emerging idea that conflict is a central driver in the evolution of biological complexity and, in particular, that solutions to conflict, notably those that arise from selection operating at different temporal scales, have fueled the evolution of individuality. 599 Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 2014.45:599-620. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California -San Francisco UCSF on 12/14/14. For personal use only.

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“…The foraging behavior of predators and the corresponding defensive response from preys is fundamental to understand how small animal communities spatially distribute, organize and eventually allow for more complex forms of sociability [42][43][44]. It thus becomes important, when studying simple models for such behavior, to go beyond mean field where a fully mixed, infinite size system is considered and the spatial structure, with the local correlations it implies, is missing.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial organization, grouping strategies and cyclic dominance in asymmetric predator-prey games

Cazaubiel

Arenzon

2016

Preprint

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Predators may attack isolated or grouped preys in a cooperative, collective way. Whether a gregarious behavior is advantageous to each species depends on several conditions and game theory is a useful tool to deal with such a problem. We here extend the Lett-Auger-Gaillard model [Theor. Pop. Biol. 65, 263 (2004)] to spatially distributed groups and compare the resulting behavior with their mean field predictions for the coevolving densities of predator and prey strategies. We show that the coexistence phase in which both strategies for each group are present is stable because of an effective, cyclic dominance behavior similar to a well studied generalizations of the RockPaper-Scissors game with four species (without neutral pairs), a further example of how ubiquitous this mechanism is. In addition, inside the coexistence phase (but interestingly, only for finite size systems) there is a realization of the survival of the weakest effect that is triggered by a percolation crossover.

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It takes grouping and cooperation to get sociality

Cited by 27 publications

References 30 publications

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

Resolving Conflicts During the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellular Life

Spatial organization, grouping strategies and cyclic dominance in asymmetric predator-prey games

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