A Mutation Threshold for Cooperative Takeover
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the leading theories for the origin of life includes the hypothesis according to which life would have evolved as cooperative networks of molecules. Explaining cooperation-and particularly, its emergence in favoring the evolution of life-bearing molecules-is thus a key element in describing the transition from nonlife to life. Using agent-based modeling of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, we investigate the emergence of cooperative behavior in a stochastic and spatially extended setting and characterize the effects of inheritance and variability. We demonstrate that there is a mutation threshold above which cooperation is-counterintuitively-selected, which drives a dramatic and robust cooperative takeover of the whole system sustained consistently up to the error catastrophe, in a manner reminiscent of typical phase transition phenomena in statistical physics. Moreover, our results also imply that one of the simplest conditional cooperative strategies, "Tit-for-Tat", plays a key role in the emergence of cooperative behavior required for the origin of life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".