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News and Views
Nature 428, 611-612 (8 April 2004) | doi:10.1038/428611a
Behavioural evolution: Cooperate with thy neighbour?
Abstract
What gives cooperation an evolutionary edge? Two features of a population — spatial structure and finite size — are factors in the success of any strategy, although more subtle than we thought.
In thinking about the evolution of cooperative behaviour1, there is one main stumbling block: that cooperative individuals can be exploited by 'defectors', who benefit from cooperation while avoiding the costs that it entails. Solutions to this problem typically find ways for cooperative individuals to interact with one another more often than they would purely by chance.
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