Fig. 3

Selected examples of competition between evolving populations with different D values, showing the effects of varying the average benefit to cost ratio (B̅/C). a–c Each plot depicts the frequency of that D value relative to the total population (y-axis) as a function of developmental coupling D (x-axis) at the end of a 100-generation simulation run, compiled over 1000 simulation runs, with a mutation step size of 5%, and F = 0 to exemplify the effects of varying the B̅/C from 0 to 2. Populations are initialised such that there are 100 fully mosaic individuals (D = 0.0), 100 partially mosaic individuals (D = 0.5) and 100 concerted individuals (D = 1.0). Each data point is the outcome of one simulation run and the black bar indicates the mean of these runs. d, e Each plot depicts the average relative frequencies of D = 0 (yellow) and D = 1 (green) at the end of 1000 iterations of a 100-generation simulation, at three B̅/C ratios, across three F values representing low (d), moderate (e) and high (f) functional coupling. See Additional file 1: Figure S6-S8 for full results varying B̅/C and F, iteration numbers and mutation step size, and Additional file 1: Figure S9–11 for simulations in tailored environments that illustrate parameter effects