ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Demographic noise can reverse the direction of deterministic selection.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Reconciling ecology and evolutionary game theory or "When not to think cooperation".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- An early warning indicator trained on stochastic disease-spreading models with different noises.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- The evolution of social behaviors and risk preferences in settings with uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Demographic effects of aggregation in the presence of a component Allee effect.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Equilibria and oscillations in cheat-cooperator dynamics.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Extinction scenarios in evolutionary processes: a multinomial Wright-Fisher approach.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Reproductive variance can drive behavioral dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Stochasticity directs adaptive evolution toward nonequilibrium evolutionary attractors.Ecology · 2023Article
- Stochastic survival of the densest and mitochondrial DNA clonal expansion in aging.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Cheater suppression and stochastic clearance through quorum sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Evolution of cooperation with joint liability.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Effects of stochasticity on the length and behaviour of ecological transients.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Understanding evolutionary and ecological dynamics using a continuum limit.Ecology and evolution · 2021Review
- Two-dimensional adaptive dynamics of evolutionary public goods games: finite-size effects on fixation probability and branching time.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Aggregative cycles evolve as a solution to conflicts in social investment.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Tipping point and noise-induced transients in ecological networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Deterministic evolutionary theory robustly predicts that populations displaying altruistic behaviors will be driven to extinction by mutant cheats that absorb common benefits but do not themselves contribute. Here we show that when demographic stochasticity is accounted for, selection can in fact act in the reverse direction to that predicted deterministically, instead favoring cooperative behaviors that appreciably increase the carrying capacity of the population. Populations that exist in larger numbers experience a selective advantage by being more stochastically robust to invasions than smaller populations, and this advantage can persist even in the presence of reproductive costs. We investigate this general effect in the specific context of public goods production and find conditions for stochastic selection reversal leading to the success of public good producers. This insight, developed here analytically, is missed by the deterministic analysis as well as by standard game theoretic models that enforce a fixed population size. The effect is found to be amplified by space; in this scenario we find that selection reversal occurs within biologically reasonable parameter regimes for microbial populations. Beyond the public good problem, we formulate a general mathematical framework for models that may exhibit stochastic selection reversal. In this context, we describe a stochastic analog to [Formula: see text] theory, by which small populations can evolve to higher densities in the absence of disturbance.
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