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Summary: Evolution of Cooperation: Two for
One?
Martin Ackermann and Lin Chao
How can cooperation thrive in a selfish world? Recent
evolution experiments show how bacteria themselves
can generate conditions that make cooperation a
winning strategy. At least in the short term.
Cooperation is ubiquitous at many levels of biological
organization. Genes within a cell cooperate to replicate
in a coordinated manner; cells within multicellular
organisms act together to build a functioning soma;
animals within social groups cooperate to forage and
reproduce. Although cooperation is pervasive, it is not
trivial to understand how it evolves. Many cooperative
acts are evolutionarily derived characters, and thus we
have to understand how a cooperator produced by
spontaneous mutation could spread in an ancestral
population of non-cooperating individuals. Recent
studies by Rainey and Rainey [1] and Velicer and Yu [2]
have shed new light on how this might happen.
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