Related papers: Consequences of increased longevity for wealth, fe…
Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and…
While the use of spatial agent-based and individual-based models has flourished across many scientific disciplines, the complexities these models generate are often difficult to manage and quantify. This research reduces population-driven,…
We characterize the outcomes of a canonical deterministic model for the intergenerational transmission of capital that features differential fertility. A fertility function determines the relationship between parental capital and the number…
We investigate the relation between economic growth and equality in a modified version of the agent-based asset exchange model (AEM). The modified model is a driven system that for a range of parameter space is effectively ergodic in the…
In a recent study (Garrett, 2011), I described theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing how civilization evolution might be considered from a purely physical basis. One implication is that civilization exhibits the property of…
Is there an advantage to heterogeneity in a population where individuals grow and divide by fission? This is a broad question, to which there is no easy universal answer. This article aims to provide a quantitative answer in the specific…
In many cohorts (such as the UK Biobank) on which Mendelian Randomization studies are routinely performed, data on participants' longevity is inadequate as the majority of participants are still living. To nevertheless estimate effects on…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
This article is concerned with a version of the contact process with sexual reproduction on a graph with two levels of interactions modeling metapopulations. The population is spatially distributed into patches and offspring are produced in…
How long people live depends on their health, and how it changes with age. Individual health can be tracked by the accumulation of age-related health deficits. The fraction of age-related deficits is a simple quantitative measure of human…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Since the seminal work of Powell, the relationships between the population growth rate, the probability distributions of generation time, and the distribution of cell age have been known for the bacterial population in a steady state of…
We introduce a simple model of economy, where the time evolution is described by an equation capturing both exchange between individuals and random speculative trading, in such a way that the fundamental symmetry of the economy under an…
Gompertz's law tells us that for humans above the age of 35 the death rate increases exponentially with a doubling time of about 10 years. Here, we show that the same law continues to hold even for ages over 100. Beyond 106 there is so far…
Following our previous works on the health state of a population and the related health state function we proceed in developing a method to estimate the Healthy Life Expectancy in connection to the relative impact of the Mortality Area in…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
Complex networks serve as abstract models for understanding real-world complex systems and provide frameworks for studying structured dynamical systems. This article addresses limitations in current studies on the exploration of individual…
Many interventions in global health save lives. One criticism sometimes lobbed at these interventions invokes the spirit of Malthus. The good done, the charge goes, is offset by the harm of spreading the earth's limited resources more…