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Behavioral Genetics and Its Designs01:23

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Measuring and Altering Mating Drive in Male Drosophila melanogaster
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Reproductive variance can drive behavioral dynamics.

Guocheng Wang1, Qi Su2,3,4, Long Wang1,5

  • 1Center for Systems and Control, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|March 17, 2023
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

High offspring variance can surprisingly favor cooperation in evolution, even when defectors seem fitter. This challenges traditional evolutionary models by incorporating randomness in reproduction.

Keywords:
cooperationdemographic stochasticityevolutionary game theoryover-dispersion

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Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary biology
  • Population dynamics
  • Game theory

Background:

  • Evolutionary fitness traditionally measures expected offspring, ignoring reproductive randomness.
  • Demographic stochasticity, or randomness in births and deaths, affects actual offspring numbers.
  • Fecund individuals often exhibit higher variance in offspring count.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To model the evolution of competing types in a variable-sized population.
  • To investigate the impact of offspring number variance on evolutionary dynamics.
  • To explore how offspring variance influences social interactions like the prisoner's dilemma.

Main Methods:

  • Developed a mathematical model for population evolution with nonconstant size.
  • Incorporated pairwise interactions based on the prisoner's dilemma game.
  • Linked offspring number variance to its mean.

Main Results:

  • Sufficiently large offspring variance can reverse natural selection's preference.
  • Cooperation can be favored over defection when variance is high.
  • Offspring variance introduces novel evolutionary dynamics absent in fixed-size or Poisson models.

Conclusions:

  • Demographic stochasticity, specifically offspring variance, is a crucial factor in evolutionary outcomes.
  • High variance can alter the evolutionary stability of social behaviors.
  • Models incorporating realistic reproductive randomness offer new insights into evolutionary processes.