Gergely Boza

Centre for Ecological Research (HUN); International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Au)

There is continuing interest in understanding factors that facilitate the evolution and stability of cooperation within and between species. Such interactions will often involve plasticity in investment behavior, in response to the interacting partner's investments. Our aim here is to investigate the evolution and stability of reciprocal investment...

The origin and stability of cooperation is a hot topic in social and behavioural sciences. A complicated conundrum exists as defectors have an advantage over cooperators, whenever cooperation is costly so consequently, not cooperating pays off. In addition, the discovery that humans and some animal populations, such as lions, are polymorphic, where...

Evolution of cooperative behaviour is widely studied in different models where interaction is heterogeneous, although static among individuals. However, in nature individuals can often recognize each other and chose, besides to cooperate or not, to preferentially associate with or to avoid certain individuals.Here we consider a dynamical interactio...

Societies face various collective actions which posits social dilemmas, in which a certain number of group members must act cooperatively in order to reach a collective goal. Such social dilemmas are often modelled as Threshold Public Good Games, in which the collective goal is reached successfully if the number of cooperative decisions reaches a t...

Syntrophic cooperation among prokaryotes is ubiquitous and diverse. It relies on unilateral or mutual aid that may be both catalytic and metabolic in nature. Hypotheses of eukaryotic origins claim that mitochondrial endosymbiosis emerged from mutually beneficial syntrophy of archaeal and bacterial partners. However, there are no other examples of p...

Motivation: Machine learning (ML) methods are motivated by the need to automate information extraction from large data sets in order to support human users in data-driven tasks. This is an attractive approach for integrative joint analysis of vast amounts of omics data produced in next generation sequencing and other -omics assays. A systematic as...

Metabolic cooperation is widespread, and it seems to be a ubiquitous and easily evolvable interaction in the microbial domain. Mutual metabolic cooperation, like syntrophy, is thought to have a crucial role in stabilizing interactions and communities, for example biofilms. Furthermore, cooperation is expected to feed back positively to the communit...

Individual events can trigger systemic risks in many complex systems, from natural to man-made. Yet, analysts are still usually treating these two types of risks separately. We suggest that, rather, individual risks and systemic risks represent two ends of a continuum and therefore should not be analyzed in isolation, but in an integrative manner....

Endosymbiosis and organellogenesis are virtually unknown among prokaryotes. The single presumed example is the endosymbiogenetic origin of mitochondria, which is hidden behind the event horizon of the last eukaryotic common ancestor. While eukaryotes are monophyletic, it is unlikely that during billions of years, there were no other prokaryote–prok...

It is problematic to treat systemic risk as a merely technical problem that can be solved by natural-science methods and through biological and ecological analogies. There appears to be a discrepancy between understanding systemic risk from a natural-science perspective and the unresolved challenges that arise when humans with their initiatives and...

Understanding the mechanisms that promote the assembly and maintenance of host-beneficial microbiomes is an open problem. Empirical evidence supports the idea that animal and plant hosts can combine 'private resources' with the ecological phenomenon known as 'community bistability' to favour some microbial strains over others. We briefly review evi...

Systemic risk research is gaining traction across diverse disciplinary research communities, but has as yet not been strongly linked to traditional, well-established risk analysis research. This is due in part to the fact that systemic risk research focuses on the connection of elements within a system, while risk analysis research focuses more on...

Understanding the mechanisms promoting the assembly and maintenance of host-beneficial microbiomes is an open problem. An increasing amount of evidence supports the idea that animal and plant hosts can use 'private resources' and the ecological phenomenon known as 'community bistability' to favour some microbial strains over others. We briefly revi...

Antibiotic resistance carried out by antibiotic degradation has been suggested recently as a new mechanism to maintain coexistence of microbial species competing on a single limiting resource, even in well-mixed homogeneous environments. Species diversity and community stability, however, critically depend on resistance against social cheaters, mut...

The RNA world hypothesis of the origin of life, in which RNA emerged as both enzyme and information carrier, is receiving solid experimental support. The prebiotic synthesis of biomolecules, the catalytic aid offered by mineral surfaces, and the vast enzymatic repertoire of ribozymes are only pieces of the origin of life puzzle; the full picture ca...

The RNA world is a very likely interim stage of the evolution after the first replicators and before the advent of the genetic code and translated proteins. Ribozymes are known to be able to catalyze many reaction types, including cofactor-aided metabolic transformations. In a metabolically complex RNA world, early division of labor between genes a...

Supplementary Information. The file contains additional simulation results and their interpretation. Additional simulations were made with different update rules, different population structure models. Here we also show and analyze some representative time series simulation results. Text and graph files are included.

The snowdrift (or chicken) game emerges as a new paradigm in the study of nonkin cooperation in animals. Many situations, for example, cooperative hunting, group foraging, territorial defense, predator watching, or parental care, can be adequately described as a snowdrift game. In this paper, we investigate the asynchronous version of the game in w...

Mutualistic interactions among species are common in most ecosystems. Despite the ubiquitous presence of mutualism, its evolutionary origin and stability has remained enigmatic. Here, we study this problem by generalizing Doebeli and Knowlton's spatial model for the evolution of mutualism [Doebeli, M., Knowlton, N., 1998. The evolution of interspec...