Related papers: Explaining the Origin of the Anthropocene and Pred…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
Many aspects of anthropogenic global change, such as land cover change, biodiversity loss and the intensification of agricultural production, threaten the natural biosphere. These aspects seem somewhat disjunct and specific so that it is…
The development of sport performances in the future is a subject of myth and disagreement among experts. As arguments favoring and opposing such methodology were discussed, other publications empirically showed that the past development of…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
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…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
Classical population genetics a priori assigns fitness to alleles without considering molecular or functional properties of proteins that these alleles encode. Here we study population dynamics in a model where fitness can be inferred from…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation 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…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
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,…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
At a time when humanity has achieved global dominance at a scale that was previously thought impossible, it might also face an existential threat due to the consequences of that overwhelming influence on our common home, the Earth System…
Growth rate of real GDP per capita, GDPpc, is represented as a sum of two components, a monotonically decreasing economic trend and fluctuations related to population change. The economic trend is modelled by an inverse function of GDPpc…