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The social coevolution hypothesis for the origin of enzymatic cooperation

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 132–137 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

At the start of life, the origin of a primitive genome required individual replicators, or genes, to act like enzymes and cooperatively copy each other. The evolutionary stability of such enzymatic cooperation poses a problem, because it would have been susceptible to parasitic replicators that did not act like enzymes but could still benefit from the enzymatic behaviour of other replicators. Existing hypotheses to solve this problem require restrictive assumptions that may not be justified, such as the evolution of a cell membrane before the evolution of enzymatic cooperation. We show theoretically that, instead, selection itself can lead to replicators grouping themselves together in a way that favours cooperation. We show that the tendency to physically associate with others and cooperative enzymatic activity can coevolve, leading to the evolution of physically linked cooperative replicators. Our results shift the empirical problem from a search for special environmental conditions to questions about what types of phenotypes can be produced by simple replicators.

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Fig. 1: Interactions and fitness effects.
Fig. 2: Coevolution of enzymatic activity and association.

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Data availability

There are no data to report.

Code availability

All code has been made available, along with an implementation of the calculations, in Supplementary Software 1, and is available on GitHub at https://github.com/srlevin/sticky.git.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Cooper and S. Frank for helpful comments on the manuscript. S.R.L. is supported by The Clarendon Fund, Hertford College and NERC. S.G. is supported by the Leverhulme Trust (visiting professorship grant).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Samuel R. Levin & Stuart A. West

  2. CEFE UMR 5175, CNRS, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France

    Sylvain Gandon

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Contributions

S.R.L. and S.A.W. conceived of the manuscript. The modelling was carried out by S.R.L. and S.G. All authors contributed equally to the final presentation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Samuel R. Levin.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Table 1, discussion, models and references.

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Supplementary Software 1

Mathematica notebook containing all of the numerical calculations and code for generating the figures.

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Levin, S.R., Gandon, S. & West, S.A. The social coevolution hypothesis for the origin of enzymatic cooperation. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 132–137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1039-3

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