Cheating has long-term consequences in the evolution of cooperation

Freeloaders can live on the fruits of the cooperation of others, but their selfishness can have long-term consequences, reports an evolutionary biologist from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study.

“There is a historical dimension to cooperation,” says Dr. Sam Brown, the Human Frontier Science Foundation Fellow in the Section of Integrative Biology. “The act of a cooperator can continue to give benefits even after the cooperator is dead. Conversely, cheating will have consequences in the future.”

Standard models of the evolution of cooperation assume that the benefits of cooperative versus selfish behavior depend only on the current abundance of cooperators in the population.

Brown has developed a new model showing that cooperators and cheaters can co-exist in a dynamic boom and bust state in the presence of long-lasting resources, known as “durable goods.”

Durable goods can outlast their producers, and then be passed on to future generations. They include things like antibiotics produced by populations of bacteria to kill off neighboring bacteria and public parks or buildings built by humans.

In the presence of a durable good, cheaters can increase in numbers with no immediate consequences. For example, cheaters could still enjoy the shelter of an ant nest or a building for some time even if it is not being maintained.

“But freeloaders can also increase so rapidly that in a generation’s time the whole building collapses,” says Brown.

“If you have social dilemmas [where there are cooperators and cheaters] mediated by these longstanding, durable entities like buildings, ant’s nests, or biofilms in bacteria, then you introduce an instability,” he says. “It’s almost as if there is a pact with the devil, because you pay nothing now for your cheating, but you pay double tomorrow, because everyone’s cheating and the costs come home to roost.”

With environmental pollution, for example, there is a delay in costs to cheaters that pollute, particularly if the environment is in a relatively pristine condition. Cheaters gain in the short-term by increasing their resources without dire effect. But over time, more and more cheaters pollute and it can suddenly become a problem.

Brown says that this new model recognizing the ubiquity of durable goods will have diverse consequences across many fields, including ecology, economics, medicine and political science.

His next step will be to test the ideas from his models in bacterial systems.

Source: University of Texas at Austin

Related stories:

Another Worker Pays the Price for Fabricating Resume
The book "Freakonomics" estimates that 50 percent of people lie on their resumes. Marilee Jones is one of them, and it cost her a high-profile job at MIT.
Some cheaters can keep it in their genes
A new study examining social behaviour suggests certain individuals are genetically programmed to cheat and often will do... providing they can get away with it.
Cheating is easy -- for the social amoeba
Cheating is easy and seemingly without cost for the social amoeba known as Dictyostelium discoideum, said a team of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston who conducted the first genome-scale search for social genes and found more than 100 mutant genes that allow cheating. A report of their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Web sites offer test answers 'cheap'
A Web site in Ohio is offering answers to hundreds of questions on qualifying examinations for professionals ranging from computer technicians to pharmacists.
The bacteria can cheat on their mates
Pursuing our own short term interests by cheating on the rest of the population is not the preserve of the human race. It seems bacteria can operate in just the same way.
Holier than thou? Employees who believe they are 'ethical' or 'moral' might not be
Bad behavior seems rampant in business, and scholars are divided as to why people act ethically or unethically. Many have argued that ethical behavior is the result of simple judgments between right and wrong. Others suggest that the driving force behind ethical behavior is the individual's moral identity, or whether the individual thinks of him/herself as an ethical person.
New mathematical model predicts more virulent microbes
Microbes and humans interact in myriad ways, sharing a long history. Many of the most successful microbes are those that inhabit but do not kill their host. Cheaters lose. Tuberculosis settles into the lungs. Helicobacter pylori, the microbe causing ulcers, burrows into the stomach where it thrives on acids. And Salmonella typhi takes up residence in the gallbladder. All of these organisms can persist in our bodies for decades. What explains their success?
Bacteria join ranks of lazy cheaters
Baseball had its steroids and Black Sox. Politics lived through Watergate. Wall Street has been riddled with insider trading scandals. And before we cast the first stone, who among us has never tried to get through an intersection on a yellow light?

News discussion:

General Science news