Cooperative behaviour in the presence of cheaters constitutes altruism towards the cheaters.
For cheaters, the proof can be found on page 388.
When individuals bilaterally punish cheaters, agents who are sufficiently patient cooperate and those who are not cheat.
Here, cyclic change keeps in check the cheater that does not produce ill-adapted offspring and therefore has a higher individuallevel fitness.
In contrast, a cheater with a higher growth rate benefits from the economy of the others without paying the cost of a reduced growth rate.
When rare, cheater transcript would then be overrepresented relative to actual cheater copy number in the telomere, since cheaters would not transcribe their non-cheating neighbors.
Reciprocal altruism does not work in evolutionary terms if there are numerous cheaters.
In reality individuals lie somewhere along a spectrum of honesty with pure cheaters at one end and pure cooperators at the other.
