Biology session

Cooperation is present on all levels of biological complexity, affecting the biosphere and the whole evolutionary history. The public goods game presents a biologically relevant social dilemma, where the cooperators produce a substance or provide a service that is equally available to every member of the population but requires a cost from the producer. Consequently, the non-producers of the group will always achieve a higher fitness-value. The main question of the dilemma is how could cooperation still survive. The volunteer’s dilemma models a non-linear public goods game. We analyze the behavior of the dilemma’s numerical model under special population-dynamical conditions and how a stable equilibrium is maintained between cooperators and defectors without any form of assortment or aggregation. A fluctuation in the number of interacting individuals affects the qualitative and quantitative results of the model. Increasing the variance in the number of interacting individuals will increase the average frequency of the cooperators in the population. The numerical results correspond to the analytical predictions.