Séminaire externe : Silvia De Monte
Séance du jeudi 11 décembre 2014, 11:00 - 12:30,
CERLA, salle de conférences
The evolutionary emergence of social groups
Silvia De Monte
Laboratoire Ecologie et Evolution, ENS Paris
Social behaviour is classically studied by considering pre-established groups, whose members either behave altruistically towards other individuals or 'cheat', thus reaping collective advantages without contributing to the public good. The existence of costly traits benefiting also individuals that do not posses them is widespread in the microbial world, up to the extreme case -observed in the so-called 'social' amoebas and in myxobacteria- whereby, after the collective enterprise is undertaken, part of the group dies.
In our work, we blow up the life cycle of individuals undergoing alternating phases of aggregation and dispersal, and address the evolutionary dynamics of a 'social' trait that plays a role in both these processes. We focus in particular on the role of group formation in sustaining the evolution of groups whose social interactions are formalised through a Public Goods Game.
We demonstrate that sociality can be maintained in simple and unconstrained settings -both in well-mixed and structured environments- when social and asocial players differ in their stickiness.
The possibility that cell-cell adhesion played an essential role in the evolution of the first social collectives is finally discussed in the perspective of the evolution of complex collective adaptations, such as multicellular life.