Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 284, Issue 1854, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0228
Keywords
cooperation; defective interfering particles; game theory; Prisoner's Dilemma; Snowdrift; RNA viruses
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [DEB-1354253]
- Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport [PRX15/00149]
- Spain's Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [BFU2015-65037-P]
- Generalitat Valenciana [PROMETEOII/2014/021]
- European Commission [ICT-610427]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The existence of cooperation, or the production of public goods, is an evolutionary problem. Cooperation is not favoured because the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game drives cooperators to extinction. We have re-analysed this problem by using RNA viruses to motivate a model for the evolution of cooperation. Gene products are the public goods and group size is the number of virions co-infecting the same host cell. Our results show that if the trade-off between replication and production of gene products is linear, PD is observed. However, if the trade-off is nonlinear, the viruses evolve into separate lineages of ultra-defectors and ultra-cooperators as group size is increased. The nonlinearity was justified by the existence of real viral ultra-defectors, known as defective interfering particles, which gain a nonlinear advantage by being smaller. The evolution of ultra-defectors and ultra-cooperators creates the Snowdrift game, which promotes high-level production of public goods.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available