The hallmark of a major evolutionary transition, whereby independently replicating units became grouped together into larger wholes, is the “decoupling” of fitness of the collective from the individual fitnesses of the units. It is widely believed that the key element making such decoupling possible is extensive cooperation between the lower-level entities. Here, it is demonstrated that cohesive multicellular behavior can arise in a purely competitive setting as a generic consequence of division of labor. A minimal theoretical model of competitive coexistence on multiple resources provides an explicit manifestation of fitness decoupling in a rigorous mathematical sense. This form of multicellular behavior is not vulnerable to “cheaters” and can be expected to be widespread in microbial ecosystems.

In this paper, we show the equivalence between two seemingly distinct 2d TQFTs: one comes from the "Coulomb branch index" of the class S theory T[Σ,G] on L(k,1)×S1, the other is the LG "equivariant Verlinde formula", or equivalently partition function of LGℂ complex Chern-Simons theory on Σ×S1. We first derive this equivalence using the M-theory geometry and show that the gauge groups appearing on the two sides are naturally G and its Langlands dual LG. When G is not simply-connected, we provide a recipe of computing the index of T[Σ,G] as summation over indices of T[Σ,G̃ ] with non-trivial background 't Hooft fluxes, where G̃ is the simply-connected group with the same Lie algebra. Then we check explicitly this relation between the Coulomb index and the equivariant Verlinde formula for G=SU(2) or SO(3). In the end, as an application of this newly found relation, we consider the more general case where G is SU(N) or PSU(N) and show that equivariant Verlinde algebra can be derived using field theory via (generalized) Argyres-Seiberg duality. We also attach a Mathematica notebook that can be used to compute the SU(3) equivariant Verlinde coefficients.

We study certain six dimensional theories arising on (p, q) brane webs living on R × S. These brane webs are dual to toric elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds. The compactification of the space on which the brane web lives leads to a deformation of the partition functions equivalent to the elliptic deformation of the Ding-Iohara algebra. We compute the elliptic version Dotsenko-Fateev integrals and show that they reproduce the instanton counting of the six dimensional theory.