ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Reproductive variance can drive behavioral dynamics.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Behavioral alignment in social networks.National science review · 2025Article
- 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
- Altruism and natural selection in a variable environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Deterministic theory of evolutionary games on temporal networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Coupled environmental and demographic fluctuations shape the evolution of cooperative antimicrobial resistance.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to demographic stochasticity-that is, randomness associated with birth and death processes. In nature, individuals who are more fecund tend to have greater variance in their offspring number. Here, we develop a model for the evolution of two types competing in a population of nonconstant size. The fitness of each type is determined by pairwise interactions in a prisoner's dilemma game, and the variance in offspring number depends upon its mean. Although defectors are preferred by natural selection in classical population models, since they always have greater fitness than cooperators, we show that sufficiently large offspring variance can reverse the direction of evolution and favor cooperation. Large offspring variance produces qualitatively new dynamics for other types of social interactions, as well, which cannot arise in populations with a fixed size or with a Poisson offspring distribution.
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