Phenotypic Assortment and the Evolution of Cooperation in Finite Periodic Phenotype Spaces

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation in a finite haploid population whose individuals carry both a strategy and a phenotype on a finite periodic space. Cooperators help with a probability that decays exponentially with phenotypic distance, generating graded phenotype-dependent assortment. Under weak selection and a large-population mutation scaling, we combine coalescent arguments with the spectral representation of a random walk on the discrete torus to derive an explicit benefit-to-cost threshold for cooperation to be favored in stationary abundance. Stronger phenotypic discrimination and higher phenotype-space dimension strictly lower this threshold, whereas strategy mutation raises it. In contrast, phenotype mutation has a nonmonotone effect: the threshold diverges for both very rare and very rapid phenotype mutation and therefore attains at least one minimum at an intermediate rate. The high-mutation inhibition results from mixing on the finite phenotype space and distinguishes the periodic model from its unbounded-lattice counterpart.