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Leaving undesirable partners A sufficient condition to explain the evolutionary emergence of cooperation Luis R. Izquierdo, Segismundo S. Izquierdo & Fernando Vega-Redondo Abstract How can cooperation arise and be sustained among individuals who may undermine the collective good for their own benefit? It is clear that various species, from ants to people, form social groups in which many individuals work for the common good. All throughout evolutionary history, cooperation among individual units has been key for Life to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human societies are all based on cooperation. However, natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work. So the question is clear: How can cooperation emerge and be sustained in an evolutionary context? In this seminar, we will study an extremely simple mechanism that is sufficient to explain the evolutionary emergence of cooperation, i.e. conditional dissociation. Conditional dissociation –i.e. the option to leave your current partner in response to his behaviour– is a mechanism that dramatically affects the expected outcome of social interactions. In the context of social dilemmas, conditional dissociation has been shown to promote the emergence and sustainability of cooperation. Nevertheless, this mechanism has always been studied in situations where conditional dissociation was combined with other factors that are also known to promote cooperation by themselves. In the seminar, we will study the isolated effect of conditional dissociation in the evolution of cooperation. To this end, we will analyse a formal model of a finite population of individuals involved in a series of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Individuals in the model can choose any strategy within a framework of predefined (minimal) complexity, and are subject to evolutionary pressures. Using both computer simulation (i.e. a computational agent-based model) and mathematical analysis (i.e. a meandynamics approximation), we will calculate the expected level of cooperation for a wide range of parametric configurations.