Harbouring public good mutants within a pathogen population can increase both fitness and virulence

Harbouring public good mutants within a pathogen population can increase both fitness and virulence

Existing theory, empirical, clinical and field research all predict that reducing the virulence of individuals within a pathogen population will reduce the overall virulence, rendering disease less severe. Here, we show that this seemingly successful disease management strategy can fail with devastating consequences for infected hosts. We deploy cooperation theory and a novel synthetic system i...

Can Priming Cooperation Increase Public Good Contributions?

We investigate the effect of priming on pro-social behaviour in a setting where there is a clear financial incentive to free ride. By activating the concept of cooperation among randomly selected individuals, we explore whether it is possible to positively influence people's voluntary contributions to the public good. Our findings indicate that cooperative priming increases contributions in a o...

Evolutionary implications of host–pathogen specificity: fitness consequences of pathogen virulence traits

Pathogens and parasites can be strong agents of selection and often exhibit genetic specificity for individual host strains. Here we use a simple host–pathogen model to explore the consequences of host–pathogen specificity for selection on pathogen infectiousness and lethality. Pathogens that can transmit themselves more readily from host to host should have a clear reproductive advantage, as s...

Population Structure Large Shifts in Pathogen Virulence Relate to Host

Mutation in evolutionary games can increase average fitness at equilibrium.

We study game dynamical interactions between two strategies, A and B, and analyse whether the average fitness of the population at equilibrium can be increased by adding mutation from A to B. Classifying all two by two games with payoff matrix [(a,b),(c,d)], we show that mutation from A to B enhances the average fitness of the whole population (i) if both a and d are less than (b + c)/2 and (ii...