Related papers: Predictive implications of Gompertz's law
Understanding the relationship between a populations probability of extinction and its carrying capacity frames conservation status assessments and guides efforts to understand and mitigate the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Despite this, our…
Contrary to common belief, both the Earth's human population and its economic output have grown faster than exponential, i.e., in a super-Malthusian mode, for most of the known history. These growth rates are compatible with a spontaneous…
The Farr-Bertillon law states that the mortality rate of single and widowed persons is about three times the rate of married people of same age. This excess mortality can be measured with good accuracy for all ages except for young…
The impact of hot weather on health outcomes of a population is mediated by a variety of factors, including its age profile and local green infrastructure. The combination of warming due to climate change and demographic aging suggests that…
The growth rate of real GDP per capita in the biggest OECD countries is represented as a sum of two components - a steadily decreasing trend and fluctuations related to the change in some specific age population. The long term trend in the…
The analysis of a truncated sample can be hindered by censoring. Survival information may be lost to follow-up or the birthdate may be missing. The data can still be modeled as a truncated point process and it is close to a Poisson process,…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
The last two centuries have seen a significant increase in life expectancy. Although past trends suggest that mortality will continue to decline in the future, uncertainty and instability about the development is greatly increased due to…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
We consider a model of a population of fixed size $N$ undergoing selection. Each individual acquires beneficial mutations at rate $\mu_N$, and each beneficial mutation increases the individual's fitness by $s_N$. Each individual dies at…
We propose a probabilistic mortality forecasting model that can be applied to derive forecasts for populations with regular and irregular mortality developments. Our model (1) uses rates of mortality improvement to model dynamic age…
Accurate estimation of cancer mortality rates and the comparison across cancer sites, populations or time periods is crucial to public health, as identification of vulnerable groups who suffer the most from these diseases may lead to…
The question of whether a population will persist or go extinct is of key interest throughout ecology and biology. Various mathematical techniques allow us to generate knowledge regarding individual behaviour, which can be analysed to…
Smoking is one of the main risk factors that has affected human mortality and life expectancy over the past century. Smoking accounts for a large part of the nonlinearities in the growth of life expectancy and of the geographic and sex…
In many developed countries, human life expectancy has doubled over the last 180 years from ~40 to ~80 years. Underlying this great advance is a change in how we age, yet our understanding of this change remains limited. Here we present a…
In a metastable de Sitter space any object has a finite life expectancy beyond which it undergoes vacuum decay. However, by spreading into different parts of the universe which will fall out of causal contact of each other in future, a…
W. D. Hamilton's celebrated formula for the age-specific force of natural selection furnishes predictions for senescent mortality due to mutation accumulation, at the price of reliance on a linear approximation. Applying to Hamilton's…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals. The birth and death rates of the individuals are affected by a fitness parameter. The rate of mutations that cause the fitnesses to change is proportional to the population size, N.…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
A phenomenological theory of growth of the population of humankind is proposed. The theory based on the assumption about a multifractal nature of the set of number of people in temporal axis and contains control parameters. In particular…