Helping One Another: How cooperation and diversity evolve
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Issue Date
2009-07-09
Language
en
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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.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen