Coevolutionary dynamics of phenotypic diversity and contingent cooperation
Fig 4
Time evolution of the competition between cooperative strains and defective strains.
When the population is occupied by defective strain, it is most likely that the defective strain possesses a very small number of potentially expressible phenotypes. It is either followed by the invasion of defective strain with similar numbers of phenotypes, or by cooperative strain with a moderate number of phenotypes. In the former case, the evolutionary process advances just as it starts. In the later case, it gets very hard for the cooperative strain to be invaded, since it possesses the strongest resistance power against invasion of other strains. In the average sense, cooperative strain endowed with a moderate number of phenotypes prevails most of the time. Parameters: N = 20, b = 1, c = 0.3, β = 0.1, μ = 0.002, and θ = 0.1.