Emergence of Coordination (Role Differentiation) Under Individual-Level Selection Alone

Determine how coordination leading to role differentiation across distinct resource channels can emerge in groups of non-cooperating agents in a common-pool-resource ecology when selection operates solely and continually at the individual level, without recourse to group-level selection.

Background

The paper studies how groups in common-pool-resource environments avoid tragedy-of-the-commons via differentiated roles that exploit different resource channels. While the authors propose a multi-level selection framework to investigate this, they explicitly note that the more general question of how such coordination could arise under purely individual-level selection pressures remains unresolved.

This open question motivates the model introduced in the work: group-level selection shapes a common controller substrate and mutation operator, while individual-level selection proceeds via minimal-criteria viability. The broader unknown concerns whether and by what mechanisms coordination could emerge without any group-level selection at all.