Fluctuation driven fixation of cooperative behavior

Cooperative behaviors are defined as the production of common goods benefitting all members of the community at the producer's cost. They could seem to be in contradiction with natural selection, as non-cooperators have an increased fitness compared to cooperators. Understanding the emergence of cooperation has necessitated the development of concepts and models (inclusive fitness, multilevel selection, etc.) attributing deterministic advantages to this behavior. In contrast to these models, we show here that cooperative behaviors can emerge by taking into account only the stochastic nature of evolutionary dynamics: when cooperative behaviors increase the population size, they also increase the genetic drift against non-cooperators. Using the Wright–Fisher models of population genetics, we compute exactly this increased genetic drift and its consequences on the fixation probability of both types of individuals. This computation leads to a simple criterion: cooperative behavior dominates when the relative increase in population size caused by cooperators is higher than the selection pressure against them. This is a purely stochastic effect with no deterministic interpretation.