Evolutionary dynamics of n-player games played by relatives.

Abstract

One of the core concepts in social evolution theory is kin selection. Kin selection provides a perspective to understand how natural selection operates when genetically similar individuals are likely to interact. A family-structured population is an excellent example of this, where relatives are engaged in social interactions. Consequences of such social interactions are often described in game-theoretical frameworks, but there is a growing consensus that a naive inclusive fitness accounting with dyadic relatedness coefficients are of limited use when non-additive fitness effects are essential in those situations. Here, I provide a general framework to analyse multiplayer interactions among relatives. Two important results follow from my analysis. First, it is generally necessary to know the n-tuple genetic association of family members when n individuals are engaged in social interactions. However, as a second result, I found that, for a special class of games, we need only measures of lower-order genetic association to fully describe its evolutionary dynamics. I introduce the concept of degree of the game and show how this degree is related to the degree of genetic association.