nucleation

THEORY-1243: In incipient endosymbioses in nature, mutual dependence evolves ahead of reproductive cohesion, so that endosymbioses are more likely to be mutually dependent than cohesive

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Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagsendosymbiosis, individuation
SourceLIT-1570 — The Evolution of Dependence and Cohesion in Incipient Endosymbioses
ExtendsTHEORY-1050 — In Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale's adaptive-dynamics model of an incipient endosymbiosis, mutual dependence (the product of the partners' obligacies) evolves ahead of reproductive cohesion (the product of their adhesions) early on, but only under the mapping in which each partner's free-living growth depends on its own obligacy alone while dissociation depends on both partners' adhesions; the authors' own appendix shows the bias vanishing under matched mappings and reversing under the opposite one, and their survey of real symbioses cannot test it
Bears onQUESTION-277 — When formerly autonomous partners come to depend on one another, which of mutual dependence, reproductive cohesion, the distribution of essential functions across genomes, the host's regulatory control and the alignment of selection does each route to dependence bring about, and which of them, alone or together, make the partnership a new evolutionary individual?

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Source

Athreya, Czuppon & Gokhale (2025), LIT-1570, read in full in NOTE-1211 from bioRxiv v2. Endosymbioses in nature are “more likely to be mutually dependent than cohesive” (NOTE-1211, C5).

Where the evidence stands

The model result is THEORY-1050, Active, which this entry extends. It holds under the authors’ default trait mapping, vanishes under matched mappings and reverses under the opposite one (Table S1), and the authors say their table of real symbioses “does not allow us to confirm/refute” it. The promote_when above is THEORY-1050’s condition before the twenty-fourth status review promoted it, carried here unchanged, because it asks what would make the thesis true and not what the source says.

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