Evolution of altruism in stepping-stone populations with overlapping generations

We study the evolution of altruism in one- and two-dimensional stepping-stone populations with discrete overlapping generations. We find that increasing survival probability facilitates the evolution of altruism, in agreement with recent results for a patch-structured population. We allow the altruistic behaviour to affect either fecundity or survival probability. In the first case, altruism is favoured compared to a randomly interacting population, but in the second case, altruism is less likely to evolve. We consider the iterated prisoner's dilemma as a description of an altruistic interaction and compare our results with recent simulations of lattice populations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science.