Evolutionary branching in multi-level selection models

Abstract

We study a model of group-structured populations featuring individual-level birth and death events, and group-level fission and extinction events. Individuals play games within their groups, while groups play games against other groups. Pay-offs from individual-level games affect birth rates of individuals, and payoffs from group-level games affect group extinction rates. We focus on the the evolutionary dynamics of continuous traits with particular emphasis on the phenomenon of evolutionary diversification. Specifically, we consider two-level processes in which individuals and groups play continuous snowdrift or prisoners dilemma games. Individual game strategies evolve due to selection pressure from both the individual and group level interactions. The resulting evolutionary dynamics turns out to be very complex, including branching and type-diversification at one level or the other. We observe that a weaker selection pressure at the individual level results in more adaptable groups and sometimes group-level branching. Stronger individual-level selection leads to more effective adaptation within each group while preventing the groups from optimizing their strategies for group-level games.