Joint Evolution of Dispersal and Altruism

The purpose of this joint research project between the LIS and UNIL (Group Keller) is to address questions about the evolutionary conditions necessary for the emergence, maintenance and disappearance of altruistic cooperation and dispersal in evolving populations. In particular, we investigate how various factors such as the costs/benefits of cooperation and dispersal, levels of competition, conditional dispersal strategies, and overlapping generations affect the joint evolution of altruism and dispersal. To evaluate the effect of these factors, we perform extensive in-silico evolutionary experiments in which meta-populations of agents evolve in a structured environments. This project is founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Project nr. 141063.