Lab Meeting

[Aviva Blonder]

Hi all,

I ended up working on the paper I'm writing up instead of a presentation about it, so I think that's what we'll be discussing for Monday's lab meeting. Mostly I'm looking for feedback on how I'm framing it.

Here's what I've got for the abstract:

Cooperation is essential to life as we know it, but it is well known that paying a cost to provide a benefit to a potential competitor should be selected against in a well-mixed population. However, in nature, it is rarely the case that all individuals have an equal chance of interacting with all other individuals. Population structure is known to promote the evolution of cooperation, but it is typically modeled as requiring assortment among relatives or preferential association with cooperators, either based on a tag - a “green beard” trait - or past behavior. Here we show, using an agent-based model, that spatial and movement dynamics alone can enable indiscriminate, naive cooperation to invade a population of defectors and remain evolutionarily stable in the absence of any other mechanisms for aggregation among cooperators in a fluid, fission-fusion population. This opens up the possibility for group selection independent of kin selection and highlights the importance of interdependence and social structure in the evolution of cooperation.

I've also attached a link to the paper if anyone wants to take a look at it, but it's very much under construction right now. The Introduction is mostly ready, and the Results will hopefully be fixed by this weekend, but I think the Discussion might be a bit of a stretch (the Methods haven't changed much from the previous paper).

Best,

-Aviva

 Space and Movement Paper (draft)