Multicellular survival as a consequence of Parrondo’s paradox

In the face of inevitable aging and death, Nelson and Masel (NM) (1) argue that alternating life history stages between multicellularity and unicellularity enable the survival of multicellular lineages. This is exactly parallel to the game-theoretic Parrondo's paradox (2), in which two individu...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 115; no. 23; pp. E5258 - E5259
Main Authors Cheong, Kang Hao, Koh, Jin Ming, Jones, Michael C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 05.06.2018
Subjects
Aging
Biological evolution
Biological Sciences
Brownian motion
Cell Survival
Cellular Senescence
Death
Deaths
Flashing
Game theory
LETTER
Letters
Life history
Mortality
Survival
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Summary:In the face of inevitable aging and death, Nelson and Masel (NM) (1) argue that alternating life history stages between multicellularity and unicellularity enable the survival of multicellular lineages. This is exactly parallel to the game-theoretic Parrondo's paradox (2), in which two individually losing strategies are temporally intercalated to yield winning outcomes. Originally conceived as an abstraction of flashing Brownian ratchets (3), the paradoxical theoretical framework has been greatly extended into ecology and evolutionary biology. For instance, the alternation of ecological populations between nomadic and colonial behaviors has been shown to be critical in allowing survival amidst resource scarcity (4). Crucially, the aging and death of an organism are necessary for the survival of its lineage. NM (1) indicate that life persists in spite of inevitable aging; we instead argue that life persists because of aging and death. At every examined scale, cyclic subsidence and growth selects traits that are otherwise mutually exclusive, thereby supporting the persistence of the next-largest scale.
Bibliography:SourceType-Other Sources-1
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ObjectType-Correspondence-1
ObjectType-Commentary-2
Author contributions: K.H.C., J.M.K., and M.C.J. designed research; K.H.C., J.M.K., and M.C.J. performed research; K.H.C., J.M.K., and M.C.J. analyzed data; K.H.C. supervised the study; and K.H.C., J.M.K., and M.C.J. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1806485115