Selection for altruism through random drift in variable size populations.

BMC Evolutionary Biology
Bahram Houchmandzadeh, Marcel Vallade

Abstract

Altruistic behavior is defined as helping others at a cost to oneself and a lowered fitness. The lower fitness implies that altruists should be selected against, which is in contradiction with their widespread presence is nature. Present models of selection for altruism (kin or multilevel) show that altruistic behaviors can have 'hidden' advantages if the 'common good' produced by altruists is restricted to some related or unrelated groups. These models are mostly deterministic, or assume a frequency dependent fitness. Evolutionary dynamics is a competition between deterministic selection pressure and stochastic events due to random sampling from one generation to the next. We show here that an altruistic allele extending the carrying capacity of the habitat can win by increasing the random drift of "selfish" alleles. In other terms, the fixation probability of altruistic genes can be higher than those of a selfish ones, even though altruists have a smaller fitness. Moreover when populations are geographically structured, the altruists advantage can be highly amplified and the fixation probability of selfish genes can tend toward zero. The above results are obtained both by numerical and analytical calculations. Analytical resu...Continue Reading

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Citations

Apr 17, 2014·Journal of Biosciences·Bahram Houchmandzadeh
Aug 21, 2013·Molecular Systems Biology·Laura de Vargas RoditiJoao B Xavier
Dec 3, 2014·Bio Systems·Bahram Houchmandzadeh
Jul 28, 2016·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·George W A ConstableCorina E Tarnita
Dec 3, 2015·Scientific Reports·G PetersenO Seberg
Feb 14, 2015·Molecules : a Journal of Synthetic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry·Sofie Van Holle, Els J M Van Damme
Jan 7, 2017·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Corina E Tarnita
Feb 5, 2019·PLoS Computational Biology·David V McLeod, Troy Day
Mar 15, 2015·Physical Review. E, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics·Bahram Houchmandzadeh, Marcel Vallade
Feb 27, 2018·Physical Review Letters·Frank Stollmeier, Jan Nagler
Feb 7, 2018·Theoretical Population Biology·Alex McAvoyMartin A Nowak

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