Lecture 12 - Cooperation Flashcards
What did Darwin postulate about cooperation?
With social insects, selection has been applied to the family, not the individual.
What is cooperation defined as?
Any behaviour that increases the fitness of the recipient.
What is altruism?
An act that has a fitness benefit for the recipient, but no fitness benefit for the actor.
What does it mean if a mutualistic benefit is asymmetrical?
One individual has a greater benefit than the other.
Describe altruism in vampire bats.
Hunt large mammals and feed on their blood.
In roosts, individuals that have not successfully found prey help one another.
Describe altruism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Some individuals undergo programmed death (apoptosis), releasing nutrients into the population.
Who proposed the Kin Selection Theory?
Bill Hamilton (1964)
Give the equation for inclusive fitness.
Inclusive fitness = Direct fitness + Indirect fitness
What is direct fitness?
The component of personal fitness, due to the behaviour of the individual itself.
What is indirect fitness?
Made up of all of the offspring of neighbours that can be attributed to its own behaviour.
What does an actor accrue from helping a genetically similar relative?
Indirect fitness
When is an altruistic act able to spread through a population?
When
Benefit to the recipient x Relatedness between altruist and those gaining benefit [is greater than] cost to the altruist.
What is the coefficient of relatedness between a mother and offspring?
1/2
What is the coefficient of relatedness between full siblings?
1/2
What is the equation for the coefficient of relatedness?
r = (1/2)^n
Where n = connection removed from self.
What is haplodiploidy?
- all males haploid
- all females diploid
In bees, how related are fathers and sons?
100% related
In bees, how related are workers to their mother (queen)?
50% related
What is the relatedness between sisters in a bee colony?
75%
True or false:
Female bees are more related to their offspring than they are their sisters?
FALSE.
Female bees are 75% related to their sisters, and 50% related to their offspring.
What was Hamilton’s argument for altruism in eusocial bees?
Females maximise their inclusive fitness by investing in the production of sisters in the colony, as they are more related to sisters than their own offspring.
Who proposed the Game Theory?
Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944)
What is Game Theory?
A mathematical framework for understanding cooperation; how cooperative entities can overcome the obvious fitness and payoff disadvantages and persist in the face of cheating and exploitation.
Describe the work of Maynard Smith and Price (1973).
Related the economic concept of payoff function with evolutionary fitness.
What is an evolutionarily stable strategy?
A strategy which, if adopted by a population in a given environment, cannot be invaded by any alternative strategy that is initially rare.
