Helping One Another: How cooperation and diversity evolve
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2009-07-09
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
Many animals and humans live in diverse populations in which specialized individuals help each other. From an evolutionary point of view this is puzzling: why should individuals help others if this lowers the chance that they themselves are fittest and survive? Evolutionary biologists assume that cooperation mechanisms are at work. This study investigates the hypothesis that cooperation mechanisms can cause the evolution of a cooperative and diverse population. This is done by means of simulations with an evolutionary algorithm. The results indicate that cooperation mechanisms can indeed, under certain circumstances, serve as an explanation for the evolution of cooperating and specialized individuals. The implications of these results for three different domains - Biology, Society and Robotics - are discussed.
Description
Citation
Faculty
Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen