Papers by Ana Tereza Costa Silva
arXiv (Cornell University), Dec 13, 2005
Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Aug 11, 2007
AIP Conference Proceedings, 2007
Random diffusion is shown to be an important mechanism on fostering cooperative behavior among si... more Random diffusion is shown to be an important mechanism on fostering cooperative behavior among simple agents (memoryless, unconditional cooperators or defectors) living on a spatially structured environment. In particular, under the Prisoner's Dilemma framework, when allowing the agents to move with the simple "always-move" rule, we find that cooperative behavior is not only possible but may even be enhanced. In addition, for a broad range of densities, mobile cooperators can more easily invade a population of mobile defectors, when compared with the fully viscous, immobile case. Thus, such simple mobility pattern may have played a fundamental role both in the onset and development of cooperative behavior, paving the way to more complex, individual and group, motility rules.
Physical Review E, 2000
The evolution of enzyme production is studied analytically using ideas of the group selection the... more The evolution of enzyme production is studied analytically using ideas of the group selection theory for the evolution of altruistic behavior. In particular, we argue that the mathematical formulation of Wilson's structured deme model (The Evolution of Populations and Communities, Benjamin/Cumings, Menlo Park, 1980) is a mean-field approach in which the actual environment that a particular individual experiences is replaced by an average environment. That formalism is further developed so as to avoid the mean-field approximation and then applied to the problem of enzyme production in the prebiotic context, where the enzyme producer molecules play the altruists role while the molecules that benefit from the catalyst without paying its production cost play the non-altruists role. The effects of synergism (i.e., division of labor) as well as of mutations are also considered and the results of the equilibrium analysis are summarized in phase diagrams showing the regions of the space of parameters where the altruistic, non-altruistic and the coexistence regimes are stable. In general, those regions are delimitated by discontinuous transition lines which end at critical points.
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2007
We explore the minimal conditions for sustainable cooperation on a spatially distributed populati... more We explore the minimal conditions for sustainable cooperation on a spatially distributed population of memoryless, unconditional strategies (cooperators and defectors) in presence of unbiased, non contingent mobility in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. We find that cooperative behavior is not only possible but may even be enhanced by such an "always-move" rule, when compared with the strongly viscous ("never-move") case. In addition, mobility also increases the capability of cooperation to emerge and invade a population of defectors, what may have a fundamental role in the problem of the onset of cooperation.
We study numerically and analytically a stochastic group selection model in which a population of... more We study numerically and analytically a stochastic group selection model in which a population of asexually reproducing individuals, each of which can be either altruist or non-altruist, is subdivided into M reproductively isolated groups (demes) of size N. The cost associated with being altruistic is modelled by assigning the fitness 1 − τ , with τ ∈ [0, 1], to the altruists and the fitness 1 to the non-altruists. In the case that the altruistic disadvantage τ is not too large, we show that the finite M fluctuations are small and practically do not alter the deterministic results obtained for M → ∞. However, for large τ these fluctuations greatly increase the instability of the altruistic demes to mutations. These results may be relevant to the dynamics of parasite-host systems and, in particular, to explain the importance of mutation in the evolution of parasite virulence.
Physical Review E, 2006
We study the voter model with noise on one-dimensional chains using Monte Carlo simulations and f... more We study the voter model with noise on one-dimensional chains using Monte Carlo simulations and finite-size scaling techniques. We observe that the system evolution toward consensus is deeply affected by the addition of noise, and that the time to reach complete ordering increases with the noise parameter q. In particular, the simulations show that the average domain size scales as xi approximately q(-1/2) whereas the magnetization scales with the number of nodes as m approximately N(-1/2).
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Papers by Ana Tereza Costa Silva