Complementary Variety: When Can Cooperation in Uncertain Environments Outperform Competitive Selection?

Figure 1

Fitness landscape where the bottom dimension refers to different population types (groups of the overall population) and environmental states (temporal periods), while the height represents fitness (the growth rate of each type in each state, following the traditional definition of fitness in fitness landscapes ()). Both (a) and (b) represent the same case, while (a) is coarse-grained into 8 population types and 8 environmental states; and (b) is fine-grained into 28 population types and 36 environmental states (based on data from [22–24]).

(a)

(b)