Niche construction is a process whereby organisms that modify their own or others’ niches through their ecological activities. Recent studies have revealed that changes in social structures of interactions caused by social niche construction of individuals can affect seriously the evolution of cooperation. However, such a social niche also could be changed indirectly by a modification of their physical environment. Our purpose is to clarify the coevolution of cooperative behavior and physically niche-constructing behavior that modifies social niche indirectly. For this purpose, we constructed an evolutionary model in which each individual has not only a strategy for a spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma but also has traits for a niche-constructing behavior for modifying its physical environment that can limit social interactions between neighboring individuals. By conducting evolutionary experiments, we show that a cyclic coevolution between cooperative behavior and niche-constructing behavior occurred in the situation with no or low degree of ecological inheritance, in which the constructed niche could not be inherited in succeeding generations at all. Conversely, when the degree of ecological inheritance was high, the evolution of cooperation was promoted by the emerged environmental structure constructed by the evolved niche-constructing behavior. We also show that the condition for each scenario to occur depends on the settings of the payoff parameters as well as the degree of ecological inheritance.

1. [1] F. J. Odling-Smee, K. N. Laland, and M. W. Feldman, “Niche Construction – The Neglected Process in Evolution,” Princeton University Press, 2003.
2. [2] M. A. Nowak and R. M. May, “Evolutionary games and spatial chaos,” Nature, Vol.359, No.6398, pp. 826-829, 1992.
3. [3] M. A. Nowak, “Five rules for the evolution of cooperation,” Science, Vol.314, No.5805, pp. 1560-1563, 2006.
4. [4] M. Cavaliere, S. Sedwards, C. E. Tarnita, M. A. Nowak, and A. Csikász-Nagy, “Prosperity is associated with instability in dynamical networks,” J. Theor. Biol., Vol.299, pp. 126-138, 2012.
5. [5] J. M. Pacheco, A. Traulsen, and M. A. Nowak, “Coevolution of strategy and structure in complex network with dynamics linking,” Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol.97, No.25, 2006.
6. [6] S. V. Segbroeck, F. C. Santos, T. Lenaerts, and J. M. Pacheco, “Reacting differently to adverse ties promotes cooperation in social networks,” Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol.102, No.5, 058105, 2009.
7. [7] R. Suzuki, M. Kato, and T. Arita, “Cyclic coevolution of cooperative behaviors and network structures,” Phys. Rev. E, Vol.77, No.2, 021911, 2008.
8. [8] J. Tanimoto, “The effect of assortativity by degree on emerging cooperation in a 2×2 dilemma game played on an evolutionary network,” Physica A, Vol.389, No.16, pp. 3325-3335, 2010.
9. [9] W. Zhong, H. A. Abbass, A. Bender, and J. Liu, “Mixed strategy and coevolution dynamics in social networks,” Physica A, Vol.390, No.2, pp. 410-417, 2011.
10. [10] M. G. Zimmerman and V. M. Eguíıluz, “Cooperation, social network, and the emergence of leadership in a prisoner’s dilemma with adaptive local interactions,” Phys. Rev. E, Vol.72, No.5, 056118, 2005.
11. [11] C. Hauert, S. D. Monte, J. Hofbauer, and K. Sigmund, “Volunteering as red queen mechanism for cooperation in public goods games,” Science, Vol.296, No.5570, pp. 1129-1132, 2002.
12. [12] C. Hauert and G. Szabó, “Prisoner’s dilemma and public goods games in different geometries: Compulsory versus voluntary interactions,” Complexity, Vol.8, No.4, pp. 31-38, 2003.
13. [13] T. Kojima, R. Suzuki, and A. Takaya, “Coevolution of cooperation and niche construction based on modifications of physical structures of interactions,” Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems, and the 13th Int. Symp. on Advanced Intelligent Systems 2012 (SCISISIS2012), pp. 679-684, 2012.
14. [14] X. Han, C. Hui, and Y. Zhang, “Effects of time-lagged niche construction on metapopulation dynamics and environmental heterogeneity,” Appl. Math. and Computation, Vol.215, pp. 449-458, 2009.