Related papers: Explaining the Origin of the Anthropocene and Pred…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
The attempt to determine the population growth rate from field data reveals several ambiguities in its definition(s), which seem to throw into question the very concept itself. However, an alternative point of view is proposed that not only…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…
Low total fertility rates throughout the world have lead to concerns about economic growth, military security, international political power, environment impacts, and quality of life. Overall total fertility rates of today's societies are…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
We show that a simple nonlinear differential equation (originally studied in the physics of disordered systems) is able to mathematically describe the global population growth over the past 12000 years. Different regimes of population…
The rate at which individual bacterial cells grow depends on the concentrations of cellular components such as ribosomes and proteins. These concentrations continuously fluctuate over time and are inherited from mother to daughter cells,…
This article discusses the limits of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory advocated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A phenomenological theory of climate change based on the physical properties of the data themselves is…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
Growth in brain volume is one of the most spectacular changes in the hominid lineage. The anthropological community agrees on that point. No consensus, however, has been reached on selection pressures contributing to that growth. In that…
We consider a dynamical system consisting of subsystems indexed by a lattice. Each subsystem has one conserved degree of freedom ("energy") the rest being uniformly hyperbolic. The subsystems are weakly coupled together so that the sum of…
It is still common wisdom amongst economists, politicians and lay people that economic growth is a necessity of our social systems, at least to avoid distributional conflicts. This paper challenges such belief moving from a purely physical…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Growth of human population shows no signs of stagnation. The only small disturbance is identified as being probably associated with the coinciding impacts of five demographic catastrophes. The concept of the Epoch of Malthusian Stagnation…
Understanding human dynamics is of major scientific and practical importance and can be increasingly addressed in a quantitative fashion thanks to electronic records capturing various human activity patterns. The authors of Ref. [1] revisit…
Demographic transition, characterized by declines in fertility and mortality, is a global phenomenon associated with modernization. While typical patterns of fertility decline are observed in Western countries, their applicability to other…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…