Q46 - Conditional Cooperation and the Evolution of Deception

Theoretical 1 Real exam question - full text reproduced under IBO's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

Cooperation is a complicated behaviour that has evolved in animals. Conditional cooperation, such as direct and indirect reciprocity and partner choice, are some of these complicated behaviours. The simple rule which can illustrate how such behaviour evolves is the correlation between the behaviour of interacting individuals (graph below). In fact, such correlation results in cooperative individuals receiving more cooperation, so if there is a cheater, it receives less cooperation, which is a kind of punishment.

Figure 1. Figure 1.

Using the information and data, determine which of the statements are true or which are false.

A. Conditional strategies and mechanisms that enforce cooperation make the evolution of deception less likely.

B. Although overall net benefit of the cooperative behaviour is higher than the cost of being deceived, the existence of defectors doesn't allow cooperation to persist.

C. We can expect deception to evolve as long as it does not significantly increase the cost of cooperation.

D. Deceptive behaviour can occur only in novel habitats as there is no time to adapt to the new environmental conditions.

E. The relationship between cooperativeness and deception rate in primates can be explained by the relatively large social group size in this taxon.

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Question reproduced from IBO 2018, Theoretical Paper 1, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 - attributed to the International Biology Olympiad. Open the full exam PDF · Community solutions (unofficial)