Evolution and cooperation in heterogenous spatial games

The proposed postdoctoral project will identify how environmental heterogeneities help or hinder the origin and maintenance of altruism and cooperation. Altruistic and cooperative behavior is ubiquitous in animals and humans. Cooperation provides benefits to a recipient or enhances the value of a public good, while usually incurring a cost for the donor. This raises the general question of why it would ever be in the interest of any individual to be altruistic. Traditionally, the evolution of cooperation has been studied using techniques of game theory. On this basis, it has been suggested that cooperation evolves more easily for individuals whose spatial ranges of interaction and movement are limited. Earlier studies of spatial games have assumed that individuals possess identical capacities for providing benefits or have access to the same amount of resources. These simplifying assumptions, however, are not widely met in natural systems. This poses the challenge to find out how spatial heterogeneity interferes with the evolution of cooperation. This problem is of fundamental and general importance, but as yet has not been addressed in the literature. The proposed postdoctoral project will thus combine game-theoretical models with spatially explicit representations of heterogeneous environments to study the evolution of cooperation in more realistic settings than have previously been considered. This research will combine suits of recently developed methodology from spatial ecology and game theory. Specifically, it will be investigated for the first time how quantitative features of environmental distribution patterns - like (a) the ratio of and (b) the contrast between rich and poor localities, (c) the temporal turnover in the quality of localities, and (d) the spatial aggregation or segregation of rich and poor localities - help or hinder the evolution of cooperation.