The Effect of Conflicting Pressures on the Evolution of Division of Labor

Abstract

Within nature, many groups exhibit division of labor. Individuals in these groups are under seemingly antagonistic pressures to perform the task most directly beneficial to themselves and to potentially perform a less desirable task to ensure the success of the group. Performing experiments to study how these pressures interact in an evolutionary context is challenging with organic systems because of long generation times and difficulties related to group propagation and fine-grained control of within-group and between-group pressures. Here, we use groups of digital organisms (i.e., self-replicating computer programs) to explore how populations respond to antagonistic multilevel selection pressures. Specifically, we impose a within-group pressure to perform a highly-rewarded role and a between-group pressure to perform a diverse suite of roles. Thus, individuals specializing on highly-rewarded roles will have a within-group advantage, but groups of such specialists have a between-group disadvantage. We find that digital groups could evolve to be either single-lineage or multi-lineage, depending on experimental parameters. These group compositions are reminiscent of different kinds of major evolutionary transitions that occur within nature, where either relatives divide labor (fraternal transitions) or multiple different organisms coordinate activities to form a higher-level individual (egalitarian transitions). Regardless of group composition, organisms embraced phenotypic plasticity as a means for genetically similar individuals to perform different roles. Additionally, in multi-lineage groups, organisms from lineages performing highly-rewarded roles also employed reproductive restraint to ensure successful coexistence with organisms from other lineages.

Context matters: sexual signaling loss in digital organisms

“…), division of labor (Goldsby et al. ), ecological networks (Fortuna et al. ), multicellularity (Hessel and Goings ), prey intelligence (Wagner et al.…”

Groepsidentificatie en cognitie

“…Daarbij gaat het niet alleen om het feit dat GVI zorgt voor altruïsme en pro-sociale attitudes die voor samenwerking vereist zijn. Recentelijk wordt ook steeds vaker benadrukt dat GVI naast coöperatie bijdraagt aan de coördinatie van onze taken (een fenomeen dat niet alleen menselijke evolutie betreft; zie Goldsby et al 2014;Tudge 2013), de uitwisseling van culturele kennis en informatie en de transmissie van vaardigheden (Sterelny 2012;Henrich 2016;Pagel 2012). Consensus over dit evolutionaire 'waarom' betekent echter nog niet dat het duidelijk is wat de cognitieve mechanismen zijn achter GVI waarop selectie plaats gehad heeft.…”

Evolution of irreversible differentiation under stage-dependent cell differentiation

“…Studies of cell differentiation have mainly focused on the optimal condition, where mature cells of an organism allocate their resources to different tasks Michod [2007], Willensdorfer [2009], Gavrilets [2010], Rossetti et al [2010], Rueffler et al [2012], Ispolatov et al [2012], Solari et al [2013], Goldsby et al [2014], Cooper and West [2018], Liu et al [2021], Cooper et al [2021Cooper et al [ , 2022. Essentially, they are focused on the proportion of each cell type in an organism, instead of the stochastic developmental process of each cell type during an organism's growth.…”

“…To identify the segregation, we need to investigate the irreversible developmental states of germ-like and soma-like cells in our model. Future work is necessary for seeking and analyzing the conditions where different segregation occurs.Previous investigations of cell differentiation mostly focused on the state with a group of undifferentiated clonal cellsMichod [2007],Gavrilets [2010],Rodrigues et al [2012],Goldsby et al [2014],Cooper and West [2018],Yanni et al [2020],Liu et al [2021], Cooper…”