Journal of theoretical biology
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The origin of altruistic behavior has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with altruistic individuals do better than those without altruists; however, the altruists within a population do worse than the non-altruists and their prevalence in the population decreases due to individual selection. ⋯ Here we confirm the original verbal model by numerical modeling of the spread of altruistic/selfish alleles in a metapopulation consisting of partly isolated groups of organisms (demes) interconnected by migration. We have shown that altruistic behavior coded by multiple substitutable genes can stably coexist with selfish behavior, even under relatively high mutation and migration rates, i.e., under such conditions where altruistic behavior coded by a single gene is quickly outcompeted in a metapopulation.