Extended Data Fig. 7: The evolution of transmission fidelity in mixed populations, under different environmental conditions.

For the analyses presented in our main text, we assessed long-term fitness of each strategy (transmission fidelity) separately, and take the strategy with the highest long-term fitness (calculated as the geometric mean) for what would evolve in a mixed population. Here, we simulated dynamics of mixed populations (consisting of 5000 individuals), and show that this yield the same outcomes. We assigned to each host a random transmission fidelity at the start of a simulation run, and performed 5 replicated runs for each environmental condition. Three bottom plots show how the composition of transmission fidelities in a host population changes over time in specific simulation runs (letters A-C corresponding to scenarios depicted in upper graph).