Cooperation Destabilizes Communities, but Competition Pays the Price

Community Ecology, Population Dynamics, and the paradigm of diversity-stability relationships within ecological communities.

This preprint investigates a well-established problem within community ecology: the seemingly paradoxical prevalence of cooperation in natural communities despite theoretical predictions that cooperation destabilizes communities. This places the research firmly within the 'normal science' stage of Kuhn's cycle. The authors operate within the existing paradigm of diversity-stability relationships and employ established models (individual-based models and Lotka-Volterra dynamics) to explore the dynamics of unstable communities following perturbation. They don't propose a radical new theory or challenge fundamental assumptions of the field, but rather refine our understanding of how extinctions within unstable communities contribute to a higher proportion of cooperative interactions in surviving communities. This work contributes to puzzle-solving within the accepted paradigm, seeking to explain observations (prevalence of cooperation) that appear to contradict theoretical predictions. While the findings offer novel insights, they do not constitute a paradigm shift or model crisis but instead deepen our understanding of community assembly and dynamics within the existing intellectual framework.