Related papers: How persistent is civilization growth?
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…
It has been shown that the long term evolution of the Gross Product of the World after World War II can be well portrayed by the exponential function with the crossover at the year 1973, cinsiding with the Oil Crisis onset. For the the…
In 2012 the world's population exceeded 7 billion, and since 2008 the number of individuals living in urban areas has surpassed that of rural areas. This is the result of an overall increase of life expectancy in many countries that has…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
The carbon footprint of astronomical research is an increasingly topical issue. From a comparison of existing literature, we infer an annual per capita carbon footprint of several tens of tonnes of CO$_2$ equivalents for an average person…
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued for challenging inside views (informed by contextual specifics) with outside views (based on historical "base rates" for certain event types). A reasonable inside view of the prospects for the global…
The comprehensive strength of a country varies from strong to weak, divided into three condition: descending, periodicity destruction or rapidly rising, Exploring the differences can solve the development crisis. the most important things…
Unconstrained CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning has been the dominant cause of observed anthropogenic global warming. The amounts of "proven" and potential fossil fuel reserves are uncertain and debated. Regardless of the true values,…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
Real GDP growth rate in developed countries is found to be a sum of two terms. The first term is the reciprocal value of the duration of the period of mean income growth with work experience, Tcr. The current value of Tcr in the USA is 40…
With negative growth in real production in many countries and debt levels which become an increasing burden on developed societies, the calls for a change in economic policy and even the monetary system become louder and increasingly…
We consider an asexual biological population of constant size $N$ evolving in discrete time under the influence of selection and mutation. Beneficial mutations appear at rate $U$ and their selective effects $s$ are drawn from a distribution…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
The artificial intelligence industry is not an isolated economic phenomenon; it is the current physical substrate for a broader, multi-billion-year process: the evolution of an abstract intelligence on Earth. As the scale of computation…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…