Heritability promotes cooperation in spatial public goods games

Heritability is ubiquitous within most real biological or social systems. A heritable trait is most simply an offspring's trait that resembles the parent's corresponding trait, which can be fitness, strategy, or the way of strategy adoption for evolutionary games. Here we study the effects of heritability on the evolution of spatial public goods games. In our model, the fitness of players is determined by the payoffs from the current interactions and their history. Based on extensive simulations, we find that the density of cooperators is enhanced by increasing the heritability of players over a wide range of the multiplication factor. We attribute the enhancement of cooperation to the inherited fitness that stabilizes the fitness of players, and thus prevents the expansion of defectors effectively. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.