Related papers: Female Fertility and Longevity
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
This study presents a model that examines how families make decisions about having children, managing resources, and planning for their financial security in light of social and economic factors. It explores the balance between the number…
The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in…
The strong Allee effect plays an important role on the evolution of population in ecological systems. One important concept is the Allee threshold that determines the persistence or extinction of the population in a long time. In general, a…
Demographic stochasticity is important in determining extinction risks of small populations, but it is largely unknown how its effect depends on the life histories of species. We modeled effects of demographic stochasticity on extinction…
Why do some females menstruate at all? Answering this question has implications for understanding the tight links between reproductive function and organismal immunity. Here we build on the growing evidence that menstruation is the…
We generalize the standard Penna bit-string model of biological ageing by assuming that each deleterious mutation diminishes the survival probability in every time interval by a small percentage. This effect is added to the usual lethal but…
Take a look around you -- in your family, your school or workplace, in the streets, and you see boys & girls in about equal proportion, and without any easily visible gender patterns in case of siblings. So, to the famous first order of…
Human aging is marked by a steady rise in the risk of dying with age-a process demographers call senescence. Over the past century, life expectancy has risen dramatically, but is this because we are aging slower, or simply starting it…
Parental origin effects play an important role in mammal development and disorder. Case-control mother-child pair genotype data can be used to detect parental origin effects and is often convenient to collect in practice. Most existing…
What is a population? This review considers how a population may be defined in terms of understanding the structure of the underlying genetics of the individuals involved. The main approach is to consider statistically identifiable groups…
A large amount of population models use the concept of a carrying capacity. Simulated populations are bounded by invoking finite resources through a survival probability, commonly referred to as the Verhulst factor. The fact, however, that…
Genetic data are often used to infer demographic history and changes or detect genes under selection. Inferential methods are commonly based on models making various strong assumptions: demography and population structures are supposed…
This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the…
In a cross-sectional study, adolescent and young adult females were asked to recall the time of menarche, if experienced. Some respondents recalled the date exactly, some recalled only the month or the year of the event, and some were…
Reconstructing past population size from present day genetic data is a major goal of population genetics. Recent empirical studies infer population size history using coalescent-based models applied to a small number of individuals. Here we…
Extensive post reproductive lifespan (PRLS) is observed only in a few species, such as humans or resident killer whales, and its origin is under debate. Hypotheses like mother-care and grandmother-care invoke strategies of…
Populations exhibiting partial migration consist of two groups of individuals: Those that mi- grate between habitats, and those that remain fixed in a single habitat. We propose several discrete-time population models to investigate the…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…