MITACS/PIMS Mathematical Biology Seminar:Florence Debarre

Why do some individuals provide benefits to others at a cost to themselves? "The puzzle of altruism" has already generated thousands of studies, but the multiplicity of frameworks (game theory, kin selection, group selection) gives an overall impression of confusion. In addition, the conditions for the evolution of altruism sometimes seem to rely on artificial details, such as the "rule" (Birth-Death or Death-Birth) chosen to update the population. In this presentation, I show how going back to a mechanistic description of the process helps better understand what is really needed for the evolution of altruism, and why DB and BD are in fact symmetrical. I present a single condition for the evolution of altruism that unifies and generalizes most of the theoretical studies done in populations of fixed sizes and with additive games.