Survival of united populations in unstable environments
aInstitute of Psychology, RAS
Yaroslavskaya st., 13, Moscow, 129366 Russia
bLomonosov Moscow State University
Leninsky gori, Moscow, 119234 Russia
cMoscow State University of Psychology and Education
Sretenka st., 29, Moscow, 127051 Russia
*e-mail: neuru@mail.ru
Here we study the role of cooperation for population survival in unstable environments without the presumption of beneficial cooperation. The instability of an environment was modeled as the strength of oscillations of the available resource. A cooperation is viewed as any mutual assistance between phenotypic classes of a population and considered as interchange of offsprings inside a polymorphic population as well as exchange of the obtained resources among them. In the model we studied the dynamics of populations’ sizes comparing one polymorphic population with several independent monomorphic populations, specialization and generalization of individuals relating to resource niches. One united population that occupies all resource niches is shown to survive better than several specialized populations, one per niche, in an unstable environment. The generalization of individuals, that is an ability to receive halfed resource amount from two niches, and the redistribution of obtained resources are also appeared to be efficient strategies. We hypothesize that the type of environment – either stable, or unstable – is a key factor that influences the population type formation in evolution. The analogy to socio-economic relations in the human society is discussed. Presumably cooperative relations are indicative of a culture type in unstable environments.
