Mathematics Colloquium: Modeling the Evolution of Cooperation via Natural Selection at Multiple Levels of Organization

Speaker:  Daniel Cooney, U of Illinois

Title:  Modeling the Evolution of Cooperation via Natural Selection at Multiple Levels of Organization

Abstract :  Natural selection often simultaneously operates across multiple levels of biological organization, with examples of such cross-scale evolutionary dynamics arising in settings including the evolution of the early cell, the evolution of virulence, and the sustainable management of common-pool resources. These scenarios often present an evolutionary conflict between the incentive of individuals to cheat and the collective incentive to establish cooperation within a group. In this talk, we will explore how evolutionary game theory can be used to explore the evolution of cooperation both within a single group and within a group-structured population. We will then present the recent Luo-Mattingly framework for modeling evolutionary competition at two levels using a nested birth-death process, as well as how to derive a hyperbolic PDE describing the strategic composition of a group-structured population in the limit of infinite population size. We will discuss numerical and analytical approaches for studying the long-time behavior of the resulting PDE, characterizing how long-time support for cooperation depends on the presence of a sufficient strength of between-group competition. Surprisingly, when groups are best off with an intermediate level of cooperation, individual-level competition casts a long shadow on the dynamics of multilevel selection: no level of between-group competition can erase the effects of the individual incentive to defect. This talk is based on joint work with Yoichiro Mori.

 

Time:  Friday, April 5, 3:30pm – 4:30pm

Place:  Exploratory Hall, room 4106

Zoom and In-person