Coevolution

Coevolution occurs when changes in at least two species’ genetic compositions reciprocally affect each other’s evolution.

There is evidence for coevolution at the level of populations and species. Charles Darwin briefly described the concept of coevolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) and developed it in detail in Fertilisation of Orchids (1862). It is likely that viruses and their hosts coevolve in various scenarios.

However, there is little evidence of coevolution driving large-scale changes in Earth’s history, since abiotic factors such as mass extinction and expansion into ecospaces seem to guide the shifts in the abundance of major groups. One proposed specific example was the evolution of high-crowned teeth in grazers when grasslands spread through North America - long held up as an example of coevolution. We now know that these events happened independently.

Coevolution can occur at many biological levels: it can be as microscopic as correlated mutations between amino acids in a protein or as macroscopic as covarying traits between different species in an environment. Each party in a coevolutionary relationship exerts selective pressures on the other, thereby affecting each other’s evolution. Coevolution of different species includes the evolution of a host species and its parasites (host–parasite coevolution), and examples of mutualism evolving through time. Evolution in response to abiotic factors, such as climate change, is not biological coevolution (since climate is not alive and does not undergo biological evolution).

The general conclusion is that coevolution may be responsible for much of the genetic diversity seen in normal populations including: blood-plasma polymorphism, protein polymorphism, histocompatibility systems, etc.

The parasite/host relationship probably drove the prevalence of sexual reproduction over the more efficient asexual reproduction. It seems that when a parasite infects a host, sexual reproduction affords a better chance of developing resistance (through variation in the next generation), giving sexual reproduction viability for fitness not seen in the asexual reproduction, which produces another generation of the organism susceptible to infection by the same parasite.

Coevolution is primarily a biological concept, but researchers have applied it by analogy to fields such as computer science, sociology, international political economy and astronomy, among others.

See also

Mutualistic networks, Ecology

Material

• Lecture on coevolution

Papers

• Perc, M., & Szolnoki, A. (2010). Coevolutionary games-a mini review. BioSystems, 99(2), 109-125.
• Potter, M. A., & De Jong, K. A. (1994). A cooperative coevolutionary approach to function optimization. In International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (pp. 249-257). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Tan, K. C., Yang, Y. J., & Goh, C. K. (2006). A distributed cooperative coevolutionary algorithm for multiobjective optimization. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 10(5), 527-549.
• Dreżewski, R., & Siwik, L. (2008). Co-evolutionary multi-agent system for portfolio optimization. In Natural Computing in Computational Finance (pp. 271-299). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Dreżewski, R., & Siwik, L. (2007, April). Co-evolutionary multi-agent system with predator-prey mechanism for multi-objective optimization. In International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms (pp. 67-76). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Volberda, H. W., & Lewin, A. Y. (2003). Co‐evolutionary dynamics within and between firms: From evolution to co‐evolution. Journal of management studies, 40(8), 2111-2136.
• Burgelman, R. A. (2002). Strategy as vector and the inertia of coevolutionary lock-in. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(2), 325-357.
• Gross, T., & Blasius, B. (2008). Adaptive coevolutionary networks: a review. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 5(20), 259-271.
• Dunbar, R. I. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and brain sciences, 16(04), 681-694.

Books

• Thompson, J. N. (1994). The coevolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.
• Geels, F. W. (2005). Technological transitions and system innovations: a co-evolutionary and socio-technical analysis. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Norgaard, R. B. (2006). Development betrayed: The end of progress and a co-evolutionary revisioning of the future. Routledge.
• Durham, W. H. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, culture, and human diversity. Stanford University Press.
• Thompson, J. N. (2005). The geographic mosaic of coevolution. University of Chicago Press.