Abstract
As our understanding of biological evolution continues to deepen, tension still surrounds the relationship between competition and cooperation in the evolution of the biosphere, with rival viewpoints often associated with the Red Queen and Black Queen hypotheses respectively. This essay seeks to reconcile these viewpoints by integrating observations of some general trends in biosphere evolution with concepts from game theory. It is here argued that biodiversity and ecological cooperation are intimately related, and that both tend to cyclically increase over biological history; this is likely due to the greater relative stability of cooperation over competition as a means of long-term conflict resolution within ecosystems. By integrating this view of the biosphere with existing models such as Niche Game Theory, it may be argued that competition and cooperation in ecosystems coexist at equilibria which shift preferentially towards increasing cooperation over biological history. This potentially points to a state of “cooperative equilibrium” as a limit or endpoint in long-term biosphere evolution, such that Black Queen and Red Queen behavior dominate different phases in an evolutionary movement towards optimal cooperative stability in ecological networks. This concept, if accepted, may also bear implications for developing future mathematical models in evolutionary biology, as well as for resolving the perennial debate regarding the relative roles of conflict and harmony in nature.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks belong to Dr. F. Jacobs and to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful criticism, and also to Benjamin Culver and Pietro Stroik for their support. This work would have been impossible without access to the Purdue University Library Database, for which the author is very grateful. The author does not commit any of those acknowledged to adherence to the views expressed in this paper. AMDG.
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Herring, J. Cooperative Equilibrium in Biosphere Evolution: Reconciling Competition and Cooperation in Evolutionary Ecology. Acta Biotheor 69, 629–641 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-021-09409-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-021-09409-z