1 vote

Genetic similarity promotes evolution of cooperation under lethal intergroup competition

Oleg Smirnov¹ and John Orbell²

Correspondence: (Login to view email address)

1. Stony Brook University, Political Science
2. University of Oregon, Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences

PDF (50.5 KB)

Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 21 March 2008 22:48 UTC; Posted 24 March 2008

Subjects:

Evolutionary Biology

Tags:

• intergroup competition
• group selection
• altruism
• cooperation

Abstract:

Altruism (helping others at a cost to oneself) may evolve via group selection if the cost of altruism to the individual is compensated for by growth differences among groups when (1) there is high genetic variation among members of different groups; (2) more altruistic groups grow faster and (3) between-group migration is low. Nevertheless, group selection may not fully explain the actual evolution of helping behaviour if between-group migration was sufficiently common to have reduced between-group genetic variance. Lethal intergroup competition, which amplifies such growth differences between groups, appears to have been frequent in humans’; ancestral environments and could bear importantly on the evolution of altruism. Here we show that between-group migration and resulting genetic similarity can promote the evolution of costly helping behavior in the context of lethal intergroup conflict, albeit by selection at the individual level and not by group selection. The standard group selection models do not capture such basic elements of lethal intergroup competition as the possibility of an individual’s altruism being critical to the group’s success when that possibility is inversely proportional to genetic variation among members of the competing groups.

Discussion

Votes:

1 vote

(Login to vote)

Comments:

0 comments

(Login to post a comment)

Share:

(Login to share with a colleague)

Additional information

License:

This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Smirnov, Oleg and Orbell, John. Genetic similarity promotes evolution of cooperation under lethal intergroup competition. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1710.1> (2008)

Version info:

Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings

None.

Other versions of this document elsewhere on the web

None known.

Submit a new version link